Laundry tips for Vacation Rental

[Jake Knight]

I have a vacation rental going online next month and one thing I haven't completely figured out is the laundry on a short turnover. I was hoping to have my cleaners come and spend about 2 hours preparing the 2bd house for the next guests, but if I'm accommodating up to 8 guests (4 beds + towels), how can I ensure that all of the linens are ready to go and not have the cleaner there for 3-4 hours waiting for a few loads to be done? Is my only choice to pay them for 3 hours of work?

This city doesn't have any good STR services such as Properly that can do this for me and I am not in the same state as the house.

[Waverly Rennie]

Hi @Jake Knight -  Having duplicate linens is good for several reasons, not just the quicker turnover but also because we have had a couple of times where the guests had stained the duvet cover or sheet or towel or bedside throw rug beyond laundry-ing, so we had to have a replacement fast. (BTW, I just count that as the cost of doing business, I don't take it out of their deposit- at least so far.) I have now gone to all white towels, white sheets and white duvet covers since 1) they bleach up nicely 2) they make the beds/rooms look bigger and cleaner (I put a colorful throw across the bottom of the bed, and sometimes colored shams, to make it look cheerful) and 3) they are interchangeable between rooms and properties.

The time to clean for a given property really varies depending on how many people stay, and whether there were pets or not. I have four different places and a few different cleaners- I charge the guest for the cleaning fee, keep maybe $20 of it and the rest is for the cleaner. She gets $150 for a 2200 sqft 3/3 house, $100 for 2 different 800 sqft 2/1 houses, to $50 or 60 for a 1/1 600 sqft place. If there is a dog, the cleaner gets another $50 since she has to spend a lot more time. Sometimes she only spends 3 hours cleaning the 3/3, and sometimes it's 6-7 hours, depending on how many people were there and how dirty they left it. I told her that it would be a flat fee and sometimes it would be easy and sometimes it would be hard, and that we would see how it went. So far she has been happy with it. 

I use the extra $ i collect to help pay for when I need to have an extra deep clean, things that aren't part of the normal cleaning, like windows or an extra day of cleaning like scrubbing all the woodwork etc. One of my cleaners is the "property manager" for two of the properties, and as part of her earning a % on the bookings, she has to deal with stuff like cleaning out the trashcans and recycling cans occasionally, or doublechecking that the dog poop was cleaned up by the guests, cleaning the barbecue, or overseeing powerwashing of the deck and siding, which aren't part of the regular cleaning. I have ended up making a cleaning/set up checklists for the properties (after saying for months that I needed to do it) since there are little things that they forget to do like cleaning out the soap dish, putting bottles of water in the fridge, or putting the cake of soap in the shower, etc. It's good to spell out what should be covered ahead of time and clarify things, even such things as i expected the cleaner should clean off the front porch tables and chairs, and she didn't think that was part of her job, so we had to negotiate that.

It's amazing how much time and thought all of this takes! I have gotten superhost status on AirBnB and I know that having very clean properties has contributed to that. I'm not sure that it makes that much of a difference in terms of getting bookings but I figure every little bit helps.

Best of luck, W

@Jake Knight