The cleaning of your rental: Don’t underestimate!
Renting your home as a vacation rental requires a significant paradigm shift from thinking about your vacation rental home like an owner to thinking about it as a guest does. As owners who live in our homes, we are less likely to notice the little things that make our home appear “lived in,” while to guests, those are the exact things we fund upsetting and make us curl our noses.
When we live in and clean our own homes, cleaning is perceptional. But not when we’re guests in someone else’s home. The “little” things like fingerprints on the front of the refrigerator, a single hair on the pillowcase, or a few crumbs in the sofa cushions often go unnoticed or worried about when we’re in our own space, but as guests in vacation homes, these types of oversights are never overlooked.
Poor Cleaning Kills Reviews
In fact, most of the “gotchas” in the vacation rental industry come as a result of poor cleaning. While guests are sure to call a property manager about a faulty BBQ grill, they’re much more likely to actually demand money back—or even worse, give a poor review—for something they perceive as being unsanitary.
Essentially, we’re saying the success of your home consistently renting is whether or not it’s clean. And this is true. However, another thing we know to be true is that unless you’re doing the cleaning yourself, how can you be sure it’s being done well? It’s impossible.
Or is it?
What About the Principal Agent Problem?
We’ve figured out how to solve the principal and agent problem. We know that cleaning is essential for owners and we know if we don’t provide a good workplace to cleaners and pay them enough to incentivize excellence, the whole operation comes to a halt. And this includes the lucrative rental of your home.
We’ve solved the problem at its root. We have an in-house built app that provides the accountability and structure needed for cleaners to meet expectations while enjoying workplace autonomy with little to no micromanagement. Sure, many vacation rental management cleaning services utilize technology to manage and structure their staffing duties and functions, but ours is built in-house, which means we know exactly what we need and what works for our owners and our cleaning staff… and when something doesn’t work, we can immediately change it or fix it.
Why does this matter? We’re expert hosts in this industry and we know the guest experience is based largely on their impression of whether you care about and are able to answer their questions and fix their needs. And usually they want these things done immediately. Similarly, cleaners have very tight and busy schedules. They can’t afford to lose minutes waiting for help. The system needs to be essentially flawless. If you can't be quick enough to fix the issues or understand how your cleaners are using the app and make the necessary changes fast, then suddenly their jobs become a burden and they lose the momentum of providing excellent service.
We’ve Got the Staffing
And, good cleaners are hard to come by. Staff to support excellent vacation rental cleaning in North Lake Tahoe can be hard to find. It’s a difficult job with rigid expectations and often not overly lucrative. Once we find excellent employees, we work to keep them because it is their services that can make or break our company… and our incomes.
Finally, the partnership the superhost side of us has with the vacation rental cleaning side of us is seamless because we’re both owned and operated by the same parent company. We know you have choice in manager/host services as well as in cleaning companies in North Lake Tahoe, but why not choose a duo that is used to and has fine-tuned working together?
That’s the thing… you wouldn’t.