Graffiti is a common site in all of Australia’s biggest cities. While sprawling multilevel murals are stunning (and a popular walking-tour subject), messy tags across a shopfront window or a strata building wall can reduce building value, and deter potential customers. So, if you’ve found tags and messy graffiti on your property, what do you do to remove it – and prevent repeat tags? Clean Green Strata has the answer.
Install motion sensor lights
There’s no getting around that most tagging takes place at night. You may leave a pristine wall in the afternoon to return in the early morning to find it covered in tags. To prevent these nocturnal taggers from choosing your walls as their canvas, consider investing in more lights, and especially motion sensor lights that turn on the moment they approach your building. It may not spook everyone, but it will spook some.
Don’t let the graffiti stay for long
Walls with graffiti on them are likely to get more graffiti on them. Make sure you’re vigilant about scouring and repainting your walls as soon as a tag goes up in order to prevent it from becoming a common destination for local taggers.
To make your cleaning up easier next time, consider investing in anti-graffiti paints on all reachable surfaces. It’s likely to be a time and money-saving decision in the long run.
If you can’t fight them, join them
Are you discovering fresh graffiti before your last coat of paint has even had time to dry? There may be hope yet. In the world of graffiti, like most others, there’s a respected hierarchy.
The hierarchy is as follows from least to most respected:
4 Tag (quick walk-by scribbles)
3 Throw-up (a more elaborate, but still quick signature – think bubble fonts)
2 Piece (short for masterpiece) (more elaborate yet. These take time, planning, and effort. They are often done by several graffitist)
1 Mural (These are often paid pieces and take days, often weeks to complete).
Taggers and graffiti artists won’t cover up the work of someone else, unless they want to antagonize them. But graffiti types of a higher quality (and more effort), such as a mural, are unlikely to be covered by lover forms of graffiti, such as a tag. So, if you find your walls continuously covered over by messy tags no matter what you do, why not team up with a respected muralist and invest in a mural you (and those frequenting your property) will enjoy?
