17 Years in Shetland Property,Now Cleaning and Maintaining ItProperly

Arthur & Simpson Ltd is a Shetland cleaning and property maintenance company working from an office at 68 Commercial Street in Lerwick. The business grew out of 17 years in estate agency and property management: years spent walking through other people's houses, valuing them, letting them, and watching what a wet, salt-laden climate does to a building that nobody keeps on top of.

That background decided what the business does. We help homeowners who want their property to look cared for and stop deteriorating; landlords and letting agents who need a roof, gutter or exterior problem dealt with between tenancies without a three-week chase; and commercial owners whose frontage is the first thing a customer sees. The common thread is the same: buildings in Shetland and Orkney lose condition faster than buildings almost anywhere else in the UK, and most of that loss is preventable with work done at the right time by people who know the covering they are standing on.

We specialise in the exterior fabric of a property. Roof cleaning and roof coating, gutter clearing, softwashing of render and cladding, and driveway and patio cleaning make up the cleaning side. Joinery, insulation, roofing and woodworm treatment make up the maintenance side, carried out by our own team rather than subcontracted to whoever is free. That matters when a roof clean turns up a repair: the same business can price and do the repair, so the access already paid for is not wasted.

We work across the Shetland Islands and Orkney: Lerwick, Scalloway, Brae, Sandwick and Whalsay in Shetland, Kirkwall, Stromness and St Margaret's Hope in Orkney, and the places between them. Being based in Lerwick rather than flying in from the mainland is the whole difference: we know what horizontal rain does to a north-facing gable, we know which properties are exposed, and we are here again next year when the growth comes back.