Follow this simple 3-Part system to hire the most important person in your short term rental business - your cleaner!
Hiring a reliable and consistent cleaner for our vacation rentals has been a game-changer in improving our reviews on Airbnb and VRBO, and once our reviews improved, our earnings from our short-term rental increased!
Useful Resources:
Don’t forget to download the free short term rental interview guide
Need to find your first short term rental investment? Make sure to check out this video on finding investor-friendly agents to find your first - or next - short term rental property: Get More Deals with Investor-Friendly Agents
Want to chat with me directly? Follow me on Instagram and send me a message with any questions: https://instagram.com/@persainvests
Video Transcript
If you’re running a short term rental business, there’s one team member that can make or break your success as a short term rental host. That’s your cleaner. In this video, we’re going to explore how the cleaner is the MVP of your short term rental business and how you can find the right person for the job. A reliable and consistent cleaner can help drive positive reviews and consistent revenue for your short term rental.
So how do you find your cleaner? There’s a couple of things you’ve got to think about here. Are you going to use a cleaning company or are you going to hire individual cleaners yourself? The choice between choosing a company or choosing individuals might come down to the market that your short term rental is in. If your market has more cleaning companies than it has individuals looking for cleaning work, then you may need to find your cleaner based on what your market gives you.
But all else being equal, let’s explore when you should choose an individual versus when you should choose a company. Let’s start with individual cleaners. Individual cleaners are people who have their own cleaning business. They might only be themselves or two partners working together without a company name. Finding these cleaners is often just looking online. So looking in Facebook marketplace, Craigslist turnover, BNB, which is now called Turno, and also talking to people in your local areas and seeing if they are using a cleaner for any of their rental businesses.
There’s some pros and cons to using individuals instead of a company for your cleaning. If you use an individual, you end up usually paying a cheaper rate per cleaning. This is great because you can usually pass on your savings to your guests, therefore making your overall listing on Airbnb, VRBO and other short term rental platforms more competitive compared to some of your competition.
However, there are some issues to consider when hiring an individual for cleaning your short term rental. The biggest one is that you suddenly are now a cleaner manager. If you’ve got only one cleaner that you’ve selected from these online sources, what happens if this cleaner happens to have too many jobs on the same day or is sick or is otherwise on vacation?
You need more than one if you’re going to be hiring individuals. The saying goes - two is one and one is none. So keep this in mind when you’re hiring your cleaners. When you’re hiring individual cleaners, then it’s best to hire at least two and keep them on a rotation so that they’re familiar with your property and that you can end up developing a relationship with them over time.
Another potential issue with hiring individuals versus hiring companies is that you may end up trying to figure out if your relationship with them is more personal or more professional. When you’re dealing with individuals, it might be more likely that they take feedback more personally and they might not be running their business as well as a business that has multiple employees and more people to give feedback to.
If you’re looking to hire a cleaning company for your short term rental cleanings, there’s many places you could find them. I often start with Google. I start with local Facebook groups that deal with short term rental owners and operators. I have found them before through investor friendly agents. I’ve found them before through my local REIA and I found them through networking with other owner operators in my town.
The advantage of choosing a cleaning company over an individual is that there’s less for you to manage. When I use a professional cleaning company, I can trust that in my workflow after a booking happens, I can schedule it once and get it done. If instead I’m using an individual, I have to keep track of whether that individual is going to be available as the days get closer.
Another advantage of using a company versus an individual is that they may have more short term rental customers and might have established specific systems and processes over time from their experience over the years working with owner operators. One disadvantage of using a professional cleaning company is that there’s more expense to the cleaning. You’re usually not just paying for the cleaners time, but you’re also paying for the overhead of the company marketing and the company running its operation and hiring and firing and dealing with feedback with cleaners.
So far, in my short term rental journey, I’ve only hired companies because I don’t have enough time to continue rotating out cleaners and worrying about whether or not this cleaner is going to go off and find a different job or continue working as a cleaner. Usually as I build my list of cleaner possibilities, whether they’re individuals or companies, I go through and start building a Word document that lists all of them out as well as any information I find about them on the internet that’s already provided.
Doing this first pass filter is a great way to decide whether or not you’re going to give these people a call. My first pass filter is this research I do online and whether or not I’ve found direct reviews from customers for them online or have gotten a recommendation for them through my own network. Online reviews are not always the most accurate, so I always like to start by filtering in reverse order.
So from least positive review to most positive. Don’t eliminate a company based on a couple of bad reviews. Take it in stride with the majority of what their reviews are and who their customers tend to be. If you could find instances in the reviews that they’ve worked with short term rental hosts, that’s a great plus for adding them to your list to call.
Okay, so now you’ve built your list of companies and individuals you’re considering calling or reaching out to. Before you get started calling these companies, I recommend that you gather some things about your property and how you’re going to be running your short term rental business in order to make this conversation as smooth and productive as possible. To get started, you need to know what you’re hiring for.
Yes, you’re hiring a cleaner, but you need to know - what is the square footage of your property? How many bedrooms and bath? How many times do you anticipate that the cleaners are going to have to be there? Are your bookings mostly weekends? Do you do week long stays? Are you only renting out your place for a month at a time? Knowing the frequency matters -
because the longer that somebody stays within a property, the more opportunity there is for the cleaning job to become bigger. Before you start calling, I also recommend that you have pictures of your property set up the way that you like it so that you can send this in a Google Drive or an a Dropbox folder to your potential cleaners so that they can give you a better estimate of what it will take to get a property to that quality of ready in a turnover.
Also, if you’re renting out an entire home and it’s a home that’s not a townhouse or condo where you need to take care of the outside as well as the inside, you need to know whether these cleaners only clean the interior of the space. Most cleaners only clean inside of buildings. So you’ll need to figure out what you’re going to do to maintain the outside of your property in between guests.
I’d also recommend that you know what you’re hiring for in terms of your checklist. Do you have blinds that need wiped down? Do you have a dishwasher that’s going to need to be unloaded? Is there a laundry machine? There’s some things that you come up with once you’ve walked through your property and tried to set it up once yourself that you might not know if you’re just sitting behind a computer trying to think of what are the task a cleaner might do.
You can find some of these checklists online as well. If you don’t have Facebook groups for your market. You can look at Turno dot com. They have example owner checklists that you can actually look up by town name or zip code. I actually have found some for some pretty small places. These example lists are great because that could give you a starting point.
So once you have all this information together, I recommend that you now get to calling these cleaners. I have a full list of questions that are helpful for you to ask these cleaners inside of a Google Document in the description below to make it easier for you to have this conversation and get the right information the first time.
Trust me, I’ve had to call cleaners back before when I’ve forgotten to ask super important information. Not only is it awkward, but it takes more time. All right. So you’ve got your checklist in place. You’ve interviewed some cleaners, You’ve figured out a couple that you might want to work with. Now, the next step might not be possible for you, but if you have an opportunity to do a test clean while you’re still in the area, I highly recommend that you do it.
Leave yourself enough time before you book your first guest to create a test checkout. Leave the property the way a guest would, based on your own checkout instructions and have the cleaners come in at the correct checkout time to do a turn over on your property. I recommend that once they’re done with the turnover, you come back through and walk through your own checklist and make sure that the quality of the clean was sufficient to what you expected.
Take a camera with you and take notes of anything that maybe you’d like done a little differently after you’re done walking through the property. Get those photos on your computer, add some captions to them about what needs addressed in the photo, but don’t send it right away after that step. Keep watching this video to figure out how to do this part right -
so you don’t burn any bridges with your new cleaners. The next step is keeping your cleaner. So once you found a cleaner, it doesn’t mean that there necessarily going to want to keep you around. So let’s take some specific steps to make sure that we end up in a good working relationship with these cleaners because they are an essential part of your business.
You’ve got to figure out how your cleaner likes to communicate. This is something that you probably covered in the interview. If you followed the interview questions I laid out for you in the document, in the description below. But the most common methods are texting, phone calls and emails. Some cleaners have a specific app that they want to communicate through, so just make sure that you check and see where you should be sending questions, comments or concerns to.
My number one tip is that if they prefer phone calls, you’ve got to take notes during these phone calls and make sure that you recap what was said and agreed upon. Write them a quick email to capture this information right after you get off the phone. This helps clarify if you’ve missed anything and if you’re both on the same page with your understanding and also serves as a way for you to come back to something if you’ve forgotten what you agreed upon in the future. Besides knowing how they like to communicate, what you communicate is a huge key to keeping your cleaner.
It’s tempting as a short term rental host to try to get things done quickly, and we tend to navigate towards the things that need to be solved. The issue with always communicating when there’s problems to be resolved is just that it becomes difficult for people to enjoy working with you. And even though you don’t directly work in the same company as your cleaners and you’re not technically coworkers, working together is something that you want to do for the long term, and you’d like for this person to like working with and for you.
My number one tip here is to take any time that you get a positive review that mentions the cleaning, to send them a screenshot of that. It makes people’s day to know that they’re doing a good job, especially when the majority of the feedback that they get is about problems that people are having with their service. Speaking of problems, there will be problems, but it’s important to know how to resolve them. During your cleaner interview,
it’s good to ask how they’d like to work with you to resolve problems if a guest has an issue with a cleaning upon check in to your short term rental. No matter what - photos always help. It shows that the problem is real and it’ll show the severity of the problem to the cleaners so they can best determine how they’re going to help you resolve the problem for the guests.
Knowing how long it might take them to resolve an issue after a guests check in is important. Are they available in the evenings to go in after check in time, or would they be available the next day? Having this sort of information on hand is important not just for communicating with your cleaner, but also communicating with your guests so that your expectations can be in line.
Earlier, we talked about a test cleaning. When you’re hiring a new cleaner, you can trial them out on a job and make sure that they can provide the level of clean that you need for your short term rental business. If you’ve taken the steps to go through the property after that trial clean, or if you’re doing property check ups in between guests to make sure that everything is set up the way that you like it,
it’s important that you give this feedback in a constructive way as well. Make sure you’re noting the things they did well as well as the things that need improved. And as usual, always, always take photos, having photos, and a way to show what room those issues are in, as well as a potential suggestion for what can be fixed is an important way to communicate with your cleaner.
How do you talk about the issues is very important. Make sure you’re always using a positive tone and come from a place of seeking improvement over seeking to blame someone. As you continue running your short term rental, I recommend keeping a log of any time that your guests mentioned cleaning, be it positive or negative. This is a great way to spot if you have a weak part in your checklist or an issue that keeps coming up.
If you start to see patterns, it’s important to note them and talk to your cleaner and ask what they might be able to recommend in order to solve the issue. If you’re working with a cleaner that’s cleaning lots of short term rentals, they’ll probably have some suggestions on what can be done better in the workflow, in the checklist or in the process to help avoid this problem in the future.
Trust that they’re professional and they know what they’re doing. It goes without saying that a major point in keeping your cleaner after you’ve spent all this time looking for one is to be respectful. Cleaners work hard for what they do, and it’s not a high reward job. Many hosts blame cleaners for bad reviews or bad situations. Do your best to never blame the cleaner.
Just try to work with them to address the situation. We all make mistakes and we all miss things in our day to day work. Another way to keep your cleaners long term is to keep yourself organized. Make sure you understand what items are to be cleaned on a weekly basis and what items get cleaned in a deeper clean.
If you’re responsible for stocking items and the cleaners let you know that something is low, order it the same day. Make sure that you’re on top of things so that your cleaners don’t have to run around trying to get things done before the next check in that are unrelated to keeping the property clean. Make sure you know their scheduling instructions. Make sure you know how to schedule a cleaning, how to modify a cleaning if a guest changes their stay and how to remove a cleaning
if a cancellation happens all together. Making sure your cleaners don’t show up at the wrong time will make sure that you keep their lives easier. And the last thing for keeping you the cleaners that you found is - to pay on time. Often these cleaning companies are paying their cleaners on a weekly basis, and you want to make sure that you’re not behind.
Be professional with paying your cleaners on time and your cleaners will treat you like a professional. Another way to be sure that your cleaners want to stay and working for you is building in incentives and bonuses. End of year bonuses go a long way in showing that you care about your cleaners and you respect the job they’ve done for you all year long.
Often a cleaning company will send the same people throughout the year because they get used to your cleaning checklist and familiar with the way that you like your property set up. Often sending these bonuses over Venmo is easiest, but if you want to be a bit more formal, the gift cards that work as debit cards in a nice end of your thank you card is a great solution as well.
Some hosts build an incentive bonus structure based on the reviews and ratings that they receive from guests that have stayed. This doesn’t work so well with cleaning companies because it’s difficult to keep track of who cleaned on what day, especially if you keep a full hosting calendar. If you go this route, ensure that you build a consistent system so that people don’t feel like they’ve been cheated from their bonuses.
I personally have not used the feedback bonus structure because I find it too difficult to implement in a way that’s fair. But many people have had great success with it. So it’s worth mentioning here, at the end of the day, the purpose of your cleaner is to clean your property for your guests. If your guests aren’t happy, you won’t be happy and your cleaner won’t be happy.
The best way to mitigate issues with cleaning that happen at the guest level is to set the right expectations with your guests. It’s not helpful if a guest tells you the day before check out that there was a cleaning issue four days ago when they checked in. It gives you no time as the host to resolve the issue and does not offer the cleaner any opportunity to come back and make it better.
Having great check in instructions here is key. Make sure that your guests know that within a couple of hours of checking in, you’d like to know if there are any cleaning issues. This gives you the opportunity to call the cleaners back in if needed or to resolve the issue some other way. Make sure to always offer to send someone as soon as you can
when a guest has a cleaning issue. Sometimes guests might not take you up on it, but be sure to get photos of the issues so you can inform the cleaner that there have been some things that may have been missed for them to pay attention to next time. Use your best judgment here, but in the past, when we’ve let these go, when someone said it’s okay, don’t worry about it, it’s actually ended up in our reviews later down the line that they still weren’t satisfied, even though they told us that it was not a problem.
We use our best judgment now and sometimes we offer a personal refund for the cleaning if there was an unsatisfactory issue that we got evidence for that we did not have an opportunity to fix while the guest was staying there. Sometimes we’ve done all of these things for guests and we’ve still got in a negative review. You’re going to have to just roll with the punches when that happens because it does happen.
That’s the life of a short term rental host. If you’re interested in learning more about the life of a short term rental host and how to increase your revenue, increase better ratings, and overall make your business a successful one, make sure to check out this next video where I talk more about the ins and outs of running a successful short term rental business.