Residential society housekeeping contracts in Gurgaon and Delhi have an unusually high failure rate. The reasons are structural rather than individual. The first problem is scope ambiguity. 'Common area cleaning' means different things to the committee, the contractor and the residents. Does it include stilt parking? Basement parking? Terrace? Society roads? Children's play equipment? STP area? Each omission becomes a dispute within sixty days. The second problem is headcount without deployment mapping. A contract for twelve housekeeping staff tells you nothing about where they work. Without a tower-wise, floor-wise deployment chart with timings, residents in Tower C will reasonably complain that they never see anyone. The third is the absence of a consumables schedule. Who supplies the phenyl, the garbage bags, the hand wash? When the contract is silent, the answer becomes whoever is more stubborn, usually resolved after three months of friction. The fourth is committee turnover. A new committee inherits a contract it did not negotiate and often did not read. Contracts should include a documented handover file with scope, deployment, escalation contacts and compliance records. The fifth, and most consequential, is the lowest-bid reflex. Societies are custodians of resident funds and feel obligated to accept the cheapest quote. The result is predictable: understaffing, wage disputes, sudden withdrawals and an emergency retender at a higher rate. Committees that define scope precisely, publish deployment charts and evaluate on technical merit before commercials rarely need to retender.