Multifamily communities, HOAs, office and retail properties and public facilities in Alpharetta and North Fulton County
Four buyer types are in scope inside Alpharetta: apartment and townhome communities, homeowner associations along with the management firms that hold their contracts, office and retail buildings, and public or institutional facilities. What those four share is a repeating roofline count, a budget line that already exists, and a decision maker who has to file the result rather than simply look at it.
Single family gutter cleaning is not on the menu. Rare Earth Ltd sells exactly one residential service, pressure washing, and gutter work is reserved for the commercial and multifamily side of the business. An Alpharetta homeowner reading this page has our answer without spending a phone call on it, and that is deliberate.
The reason multifamily fits best is arithmetic rather than preference. A community of eighteen buildings is eighteen roof perimeters reached from one mobilization, one notice cycle, one staging plan and one report package. A detached house is one perimeter and one trip. The cost structure of the second job never resembles the first.
Public agency buyers and corporate supplier diversity desks ask for registrations before they ask for references. Rare Earth Ltd, operating as Thrare Contracting, carries DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and appears in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 with CAGE 9JAV8. Each of those is checkable from the buyer's own desk. HUBZone, 8(a) and SOC 2 are not held, and no bid from this company will imply otherwise.
Thrare Contracting works from 8735 Dunwoody Pl, Ste R, Atlanta, GA 30350. Alpharetta is a route on the schedule, not an office location, and every North Fulton visit runs out of that Atlanta address.
Alpharetta is an incorporated municipality in north Fulton County, and that single fact decides which rulebook a contractor answers to on site. Fulton County's stormwater program is written for unincorporated Fulton County, with everything inside a city boundary left to that city. An Alpharetta apartment community therefore sits under Alpharetta's ordinance, not the county's, and a vendor quoting county procedure on a Windward Parkway property is quoting the wrong document.
Alpharetta says so in its own words. Section 3.3.4 of the Alpharetta Unified Development Code, the illicit discharge and illegal connection ordinance, fixes its own reach in subsection C: "The provisions of this ordinance shall apply throughout the incorporated area of Alpharetta." (City of Alpharetta Unified Development Code, Section 3.3.4 C.1, Ord. No. 818, 12-14-2020, read 2026-09-02.) There is no borrowed county authority in that sentence and no gap to argue about.
The city's stormwater rules live in the Unified Development Code rather than in the general Code of Ordinances, which is where a search usually goes wrong. Section 3.3 of the UDC carries post-construction stormwater management, stream buffer protection, floodplain administration, illicit discharge, and the enforcement machinery for all of it. Ordinance No. 818, adopted 14 December 2020, replaced Section 3.3 in its entirety.
Alpharetta is also not a small player in the permit hierarchy. The city states that it "has been a leader in the implementation of its stormwater program under the Phase I Large Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) regulations", with the NPDES permit administered by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (City of Alpharetta, Stormwater Program, read 2026-09-02). A Phase I Large MS4 designation means a larger monitoring, inspection and reporting obligation on the city, and a city under that obligation inspects its private dischargers.
The prohibition is written broadly on purpose. Under Section 3.3.4 E, no person shall "throw, drain, run, or otherwise discharge, cause, or allow others under its control" to put into any component of the Alpharetta separate storm sewer system "any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater" (City of Alpharetta Unified Development Code, Section 3.3.4 E, read 2026-09-02). Nothing in that sentence turns on volume, intent or how ordinary the activity feels.
The exemption list matters just as much as the prohibition. Section 3.3.4 E.1.a exempts water line flushing by a government agency, landscape irrigation and lawn watering, diverted stream flows, rising ground water, footing drains, crawl space pumps, air conditioning condensation, springs, wetland flows and "any other water source not containing pollutants". Rinse water that has run down a gutter face carries sediment, decayed organic matter and whatever product was applied to the metal, so it does not land in that list.
Section 3.3.4 B.5 closes the last door: "No variances shall be granted to illicit discharge or illegal connection." A property manager cannot apply for relief, and neither can a contractor. The only compliant answer on an Alpharetta site is to keep the water on the property, direct it across turf, mulch bed or another vegetated area, and let soil do the filtration before anything reaches a curb inlet.
Alpharetta also imposes a reporting duty that most vendors never mention at a walkthrough. Under Section 3.3.4 I, a responsible person who learns of a release of pollutants must notify the Public Works Department within 24 hours and confirm in writing within three business days. Where the discharge comes from a commercial or industrial establishment, the owner or operator "shall also retain an on-site written record of the discharge and the actions taken to prevent its recurrence", kept for at least three years. Failure to give notice is itself a violation.
Background on the federal Clean Water Act layer sits on the hub: the baseline rules every metro Atlanta address inherits.
Section 3.3.9 of the Unified Development Code sets out the enforcement path, and the numbers are specific enough to plan around. A notice of violation has to name the responsible person, describe the site, state the nature of the violation, list the remedial measures, and give "a reasonable opportunity, of not less than ten days" to cure, reduced to 24 hours where the violation is an immediate danger to public health or public safety (City of Alpharetta Unified Development Code, Section 3.3.9 A, read 2026-09-02).
An appeal has to be filed within 30 days of the notice, and the Zoning Board of Appeals hears it within 15 days of receiving the appeal. That decision is final under the ordinance.
If the violation is not cured, Section 3.3.9 E allows a stop work order, refusal of a certificate of occupancy, suspension or revocation of the land development permit, and a monetary penalty "not to exceed $2,000 (depending on the severity of the violation) for each day the violation remains unremedied after receipt of the notice of violation". For intentional and flagrant violations the city can issue a citation carrying a fine up to $2,000 or 30 days in jail or both, with each day treated as a separate offense. Undertaking development that required a stormwater management plan without submitting one draws an administrative fee of $5,000 on top of any permit or inspection fee.
The part that reaches an owner's balance sheet is Section 3.3.9 D. When the city abates a violation itself, the owner is billed for the abatement and administrative cost within 30 days, and if the amount goes unpaid the charge "shall become a special assessment against the property and shall constitute a lien on the property for the amount of the assessment". A drainage problem that nobody documented becomes an encumbrance on title.
This is the question that decides who pays, and Alpharetta answers it in writing. The city's Comprehensive Stormwater Inspection and Maintenance Policy states plainly that "Stormwater systems on office, institutional, commercial or industrial properties are not eligible to be included in the City's MS4" (City of Alpharetta, Comprehensive Stormwater Inspection and Maintenance Policy, read 2026-09-02). There is no route by which an apartment community or an office park hands its drainage network to Alpharetta Public Works.
The same policy draws the boundary on the ground: in commercial, industrial, office and multifamily areas, public drainage responsibility stops at the right of way. Everything upstream of that line, the roof edge, the downspout, the boot, the buried lateral, the yard drain, the swale and the detention pond, belongs to the owner or the association.
The Unified Development Code says the same thing with enforcement behind it. Section 3.3.1 S(c) provides that a stormwater management facility serving commercial and industrial development "shall be privately owned and maintained", with the city reserving a right but not a duty to enter for emergency repairs. Section 3.3.1 S(e) puts an affirmative duty on the owner of a drainage easement to "keep the easement free of obstructions" and to maintain it "in such a way as to assure free and maximum flow at all times". A trough packed with pine litter is an obstruction to free flow by the plain reading of that clause.
Documentation is not optional either. Section 3.3.1 S(f) requires parties responsible for operating and maintaining a stormwater facility to "provide records of all maintenance and repairs to city upon request", and the Inspection and Maintenance Policy repeats the duty in the same terms. A property that cleans its gutters but keeps no record has done the work and cannot prove it.
Failure to maintain has a defined consequence. Section 3.3.1 R states that an owner's failure to keep a stormwater management system performing as designed is addressed as a violation of the owner's property maintenance obligations, and the city then holds "all the powers and remedies that are available to it for other violations", naming prosecution, penalties, abatement and emergency measures. The Inspection and Maintenance Policy adds that where the city performs the work itself, the cost "shall be a lien on the property" and can be placed on the ad valorem tax bill and collected like any other tax.
Two more clauses shape how a portfolio owner should think about this. Under Section 3.3.1 P(c) an inspection and maintenance agreement runs with the land and binds every future successor in title, and absent a recorded assignment agreement all owners of a site are jointly and severally liable for the whole of it. Under Section 3.3.1 S(a), in a subdivision with an established homeowners association the association is assumed to be the responsible party unless its own covenants push the duty back to individual owners. An HOA board that assumes the city or the builder still owns the pond has assumed wrong.
Alpharetta inspects for this. The Inspection and Maintenance Policy describes a program covering random inspections, requested inspections, inspections triggered by complaints, and joint inspections with other agencies. Where minor maintenance is needed the city notifies the responsible party within 10 business days, and the responsible party must respond within 30 days with the measures performed or a schedule for performing them.
Alpharetta does not let a commercial site solve a canopy problem with a chainsaw, and that constraint feeds straight into gutter maintenance frequency. Section 3.2 of the Unified Development Code requires that "All sites within the City other than 'For-Sale' residential lots shall maintain or achieve a Minimum Tree Density of 130 inches per acre", calculated on net site area after buffers and infrastructure are excluded, with parking lots expressly not counted as infrastructure (City of Alpharetta Unified Development Code, Section 3.2, read 2026-09-02).
An apartment community, an office campus and a retail center in Alpharetta are all bound by that 130 inches per acre floor. The practical result is a city where commercial rooflines sit under mature canopy by regulation rather than by accident, and a roof under canopy fills its gutters faster than the same roof in an open lot.
The ordinance also names the trees it protects, which removes the need for guesswork about what lands on a roof. Section 3.2 sets specimen status at 30 inches diameter or larger for trees in the Pinus genus, 30 inches or larger for Liquidambar and Liriodendron, 20 inches or larger for Fagus, Nyssa, Diospyros, Sassafras and Magnolia grandiflora, 24 inches or larger for all other genera, 20 inches or larger for cedrus and Thuja, and 8 inches or larger for understory trees, rising to 10 inches for Oxydendrum arboreum. Sweetgum balls, tulip poplar leaves and pine straw are on the city's own protected list, and each behaves differently inside a trough.
Removing one of those trees to reduce debris is the expensive answer. Under Section 3.2.17 a violation is a misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $1,000 per incident, with each day of violation a separate offense. Where a specimen tree is damaged or removed in violation on a property that is not a for-sale residential lot, replacement runs at "eight (8) times the unit value of the tree removed" with a four inch minimum caliper, and the critical root zone of the removed tree has to stay permanently pervious with no structure on it. Owners who save a specimen tree by redesigning around it earn double density credit instead.
Read together, those provisions make gutter maintenance the cheap lever. The canopy is fixed by ordinance, the debris load follows the canopy, and the only variable a property manager actually controls is how often the troughs are emptied.
Alpharetta regulates commercial landscape and maintenance equipment by hour and by distance, and the rule reshapes the working day on an occupied community. Sec. 26-116(2) of the Alpharetta Code of Ordinances requires that commercial or industrial power tools used for landscaping and yard maintenance be operated with a muffler, and prohibits operating motorized equipment "on a residential property, or within 250 feet of a residential property line, between the hours of 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, or before the hour of 9:00 a.m. or after the hour of 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, or at any time on Sunday" unless the work is emergency work or the equipment meets the ordinance sound limits (City of Alpharetta Code of Ordinances, Sec. 26-116, read 2026-09-02).
The 250 foot radius is the clause that catches vendors out. A gutter crew working an office building whose parking lot backs onto a subdivision is inside the restricted band even though the job site itself is commercial. The measurement runs from the residential property line, not from the building being serviced.
The alternative route to compliance is the decibel table. Sec. 26-114 caps sound at the receiving property line at 60 dBA between 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. and 55 dBA overnight for residential or noise sensitive property, 65 dBA daytime and 60 dBA overnight for commercial or business property, and 70 dBA at all times for industrial property. Meeting those numbers with a backpack blower at close range is not realistic, so scheduling is the honest answer.
What that produces in practice on an Alpharetta apartment community is a weekday window that opens at 7:00 a.m. and closes at 7:00 p.m., a Saturday window from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and no Sunday work. Hand removal into a bag makes far less noise than a blower, which is one reason the scope on these properties is written around hand clearing rather than air.
The design condition comes from the nearest long-record station. NOAA puts the twelve 1991 to 2020 monthly precipitation normals for Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport at a summed 50.43 inches, against the separately published annual normal of 49.71 inches for the same station (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Monthly Climate Normals 1991-2020, station USW00013874, read 2026-08-31). Every roof in Fulton County, Alpharetta included, is drained against that figure.
The conversion is fixed: one inch of rain falling on one square foot of roof is 0.623 gallons. Run the 50.43 inch normal through it and each 1,000 square feet of roof plane sheds about 31,400 gallons across a year, all of which is expected to arrive at a downspout rather than over a fascia board.
Scale that to a real Alpharetta community. Eighteen buildings averaging 7,500 square feet of roof plane shed roughly 4.2 million gallons in a normal year. The entire system carrying that volume is sheet metal a few inches wide, and its capacity is set by whatever is sitting in it on the day the storm arrives.
Averages also hide the failure mode. Georgia rainfall arrives in bursts, and a single summer thunderstorm can deliver a large share of a month's total in well under an hour. A trough carrying two inches of decomposed leaf mat handles a quiet week without complaint and overshoots the front edge during that hour, which is when water reaches a wall, a walkway or a slab. Maintenance intervals are set against the storm, not against the annual total.
Georgia's adopted plumbing code is the 2024 International Plumbing Code with Georgia amendments, mandatory statewide from 1 January 2026 according to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. Roof drainage is a plumbing subject under that code, not a landscaping one, which is why a condition report on an Alpharetta property records downspout and leader condition alongside trough condition rather than treating the metal above the ground as the whole system.
The unit of work is the drainage path, from the point where water leaves the roof surface to the point where it is released on the property. A scope that stops at the visible trough leaves the failure points untouched.
The metro-wide definition of scope lives on the hub: what a commercial gutter cleaning includes across the service area.
Occupied property means the work has to fold into daily life rather than interrupt it. Buildings are worked one at a time, and only the drop zone beside the building in progress is out of service at any moment, which preserves the parking count a community has to keep functioning.
The general version of this sequence is documented once: how the crew runs an occupied building anywhere in the metro.
Five inputs drive the price: linear footage of gutter, number of stories, access method for each roof plane, debris load at the time of the visit, and how many visits the year is built around. Every proposal names all five so a manager can put two bids side by side and see where they actually differ.
Access is where Alpharetta bids diverge most. A three story stacked flat with a tight fire lane and a landscape bed against the wall is a different reach problem from a two story walk up with clear pavement on both sides, and a bid that ignores the difference is guessing.
Work that is not cleaning is not priced as cleaning. Gutter and hanger repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, excavation of a collapsed buried lateral, and tree trimming are quoted separately or referred out. Rolling them into a cleaning number is how a property ends up paying twice.
The boundary is set out in full on the hub: where cleaning stops and repair begins.
The OSHA requirements are documented once for the whole service area: the fall protection thresholds and the ladder exclusion.
The buying point for an Alpharetta manager is narrower than the rule itself. Ask each bidder how it reaches every roof plane on the property, building by building, because access method is what separates two bids that quote the same linear footage.
Other cities on the same schedule are listed on the hub: every metro Atlanta city with its own gutter cleaning page.
No. Gutter cleaning is sold only to multifamily communities, homeowner associations and their management firms, commercial and retail properties, and public or institutional facilities. Pressure washing is the one residential service Rare Earth Ltd offers in Alpharetta.
No. Fulton County's stormwater program covers unincorporated Fulton County. Alpharetta is incorporated, and Section 3.3.4 C.1 of the Alpharetta Unified Development Code states that its illicit discharge ordinance applies throughout the incorporated area of Alpharetta.
No. Section 3.3.4 E prohibits discharging any pollutants or waters containing pollutants, other than stormwater, into the city separate storm sewer system, and Section 3.3.4 B.5 states that no variances shall be granted. Rinse water is released across vegetated ground on the property instead.
The property owner. The City of Alpharetta Comprehensive Stormwater Inspection and Maintenance Policy states that stormwater systems on office, institutional, commercial or industrial properties are not eligible for inclusion in the city MS4, and public drainage responsibility stops at the right of way.
Section 3.3.9 E of the Alpharetta Unified Development Code allows a penalty not to exceed $2,000 for each day a violation remains unremedied, with each day treated as a separate offense. Under Section 3.3.9 D an unpaid abatement cost becomes a special assessment and a lien on the property.
Sec. 26-116 of the Alpharetta Code of Ordinances bars commercial landscape and maintenance equipment on a residential property or within 250 feet of a residential property line between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, before 9:00 a.m. or after 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, and at any time on Sunday.
Two visits a year is the base cycle, one after the autumn hardwood drop and one after spring seed and pollen fall. Alpharetta's 130 inches per acre minimum tree density under Section 3.2 of the Unified Development Code keeps commercial sites under canopy, so properties tight to mature pine or a wooded buffer earn three or four visits, and the condition report from each visit is what moves a property between tiers.
A per building condition report with dated photographs, a flow test result for every downspout and buried connection, and a punch list of items outside cleaning scope. Section 3.3.1 S(f) of the Unified Development Code requires the responsible party to provide records of maintenance and repairs to the city on request, so the report is written to answer that request.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE and MBE certification, qualifies as a small disadvantaged business, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. HUBZone, 8(a) and SOC 2 are not held.
Federal and state stormwater authority is cited once for the whole service area: the Clean Water Act and Georgia EPD layer.
Send the building count with a site plan or an approximate linear footage of gutter, and note any building inside 250 feet of a residential property line. Serving Alpharetta and North Fulton County from Atlanta.