Two ways to buy the same outcome
Every property owner buying graffiti removal is buying the same thing — a clean wall — but there are two ways to pay for it. One-time removal starts at $295 plus GST: you see a tag, you send a photo, we quote it, we remove it, done. A patrol program is a fixed monthly fee — $135/month plus GST for biweekly visits, $270/month plus GST for weekly — covering the scheduled patrols, photo reports and removal of quick marks under 15 minutes, with larger removals billed in 30-minute increments at member rates. We show up on schedule whether or not you've seen anything, find what's there, and deal with it before you'd have called. Full details on both are on our pricing page.
Neither is universally right, and we sell both, so we have no reason to spin this. The honest answer turns on one question: how often does your property get hit?
When one-time removal is enough
- Rarely-hit properties — if you're tagged once a year or less, paying monthly for scheduled visits doesn't make sense
- Low-visibility buildings — properties off pedestrian routes, without large blank walls facing the street, simply attract less graffiti
- One-off incidents — a single tag after years of nothing is a service call, not a program decision
- Owners on site daily — if someone walks the whole property every morning anyway, the "finding it" half of patrol matters less to you
In these cases, keep it simple: photograph the tag, get a firm quote from the photo, and have it removed properly once — properly meaning matched to the surface, so there's no ghost or grey patch advertising the repair.
When patrol wins
- Repeat targets — if the same wall has been hit more than once this year, it's known to taggers, and each visible tag invites the next one
- Street-facing walls and commercial strips — storefronts, plazas and strata frontages where graffiti is seen by customers and residents the moment it appears
- Properties nobody walks — rear lanes, parkades and fence lines that staff never pass; on patrol, we find the tag before your tenants do
- Buildings answerable to others — strata councils, BIAs and managed portfolios that need documentation: every patrol visit ends with a photo report
What the fee actually buys
The structural difference is that patrol is proactive — scheduled visits happen whether or not anyone calls. On each visit we inspect covered areas up to 12 feet from the ground, remove marks that take under 15 minutes at no charge, remove larger graffiti on the spot — billed in 30-minute increments at member rates, with no re-quoting cycle — and handle offensive or hate graffiti the same day. Painted surfaces are touched up from colour codes recorded at setup, so repairs are identical every time.
There's also a chemistry argument for speed: fresh paint releases faster and more completely than paint that has cured on a wall for weeks. Scheduled visits keep every removal smaller and cleaner than the same tag handled months later — and a property that's always clean stops being a reliable canvas, which is how repeat tagging actually tapers off.
The hidden costs one-time removal doesn't show
The invoice is the visible cost. The invisible ones are yours: noticing the tag (or hearing about it from a tenant), photographing it, getting approval to spend, booking the work, and following up — multiplied by every incident, and often stretched across weeks while the wall stays ugly. A patrol plan converts all of that into a line item and a photo report in your inbox. For councils and BIAs, that predictability is frequently the deciding factor, before any comparison of per-incident costs.
Multiple buildings? Price it as one program
The comparison above assumes one property. Managers running portfolios — several strata frontages, a plaza plus its laneways, a BIA's worth of storefronts — shouldn't price patrol building by building. Multi-building complexes and portfolios are quoted as custom fixed-fee plans, one route and one report covering every site, which is usually where the per-property economics tilt hardest toward patrol. Tell us what you manage and we'll price it as one program.
The bylaw dimension
In Vancouver there's a third party in this decision: the City. Under Graffiti By-law 7343, a served notice gives you 10 days to remove graffiti before the City can remove it and bill you. Patrol plans carry our bylaw notice guarantee — a notice served while you're on a plan is removed free, before the deadline, when you forward it within 2 business days. The full playbook is in our 10-day notice guide.
How to decide in five minutes
Count the tags you've dealt with in the last twelve months, and be honest about the ones that stayed up for weeks because nobody owned the problem. One, maybe? Book removals as needed. Several, and they linger? A fixed monthly fee with scheduled visits, documentation and the notice guarantee is the version of this problem that doesn't occupy your time. Plans run a 12-month initial term, then month to month, backed by $5M general liability, WorkSafeBC coverage and a 5.0 rating across 275+ Google reviews.
Call or text (778) 200-8343 · support@flatmateclean.com · or request service at graffitimedic.ca.