A Sandia Window Cleaning crew pulls coverings over its shoes before stepping onto a customer’s carpet, and the homeowner gets walked around the house. Turner Liotta, who owns the Albuquerque company, counts those moments as part of the job, from the time the van pulls up to the time it drives away.
The cleaning reaches past the glass. Liotta says the company’s five-in-one bundle covers the window tracks, the frames, the door tracks, the screens and the seals. The company describes hand-washing each screen before putting it back, and vacuuming and scrubbing sliding-door tracks. Customers get a reminder with an exact arrival time and a text when the crew is on its way, and, Liotta says, “we’ll be there 15 minutes early every time.”
The company’s name carries its promise. “Sandia in Spanish is watermelon, and so we have our watermelon guarantee,” Liotta says. A customer who isn’t satisfied gets the crew back to do the work again for free. “Who are we as a company, and why are you paying us for your service if the client isn’t satisfied?” he says.
He built the company in the city that raised him. “I was born and raised in Albuquerque,” he says. He started at 17, a high school senior going door to door with a sponge, and the company was formally founded in 2025. The people who work with him know the city and how business gets done there, he says, and because Sandia is not a franchise, nobody at a corporate office has to sign off on a change. “I can make these decisions with my team,” he says.
Many of those teammates are high school and college students, and Liotta takes pride in giving them the work. One technician who started out squeegeeing windows with a sponge and steel wool is stepping into a manager’s role and taking over some of the operations.
Liotta still cleans when a job calls for it. “I’m always there to get on my hands and knees,” he says. He knows how to sponge and squeegee, but “my techs are definitely a lot better than me,” he says. More than one homeowner has noted the owner stopping by partway through a job to check on the crew and the customer. He says he is learning a great deal from the people he works with, and he wants them to push back. “Call me out, and I call you guys out,” he says.
The work splits between homes and commercial buildings, including new-home builders, schools, government buildings and some well-known local businesses. Commercial clients get a text when the crew arrives and another when it leaves, then the invoice, then a phone call asking how the visit went.
The company works across Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, and Santa Fe is now an official service area. The van that pulls up to doors there is the company’s second, bought for that work. Liotta walked into a dealership to get it. “I couldn’t afford a squeegee in my hand at one point,” he says.