First year of my cleanout business: chase trash-outs or chase turnover cleaning?

The part I'd sit with is the gap between when you pay and when you get paid. On a trash-out you're out the dumpster, the dump ticket, and two days of wages before you invoice, and if the payer is a servicer on net 45 you're funding their property preservation with your own money for six weeks. Turnover cleaning is a much smaller float. $280 a unit paid in two weeks is almost self-financing.

So the real question isn't which work you like. It's how many weeks of expenses you can carry with nothing coming in. If the answer is two, the big jobs will hurt you even when you win them.

I'd hire you for a trash-out tomorrow and I'd never call you for turnover cleaning, because I don't own anything yet. I've walked maybe 30 houses on my list and four of them were full to the ceiling. Every one of those, I wanted a phone number and I didn't have one.

Dumb question first: what actually counts as a trash-out? I assumed it meant hauling junk to the dump, but people in this room talk about personal property like it's a whole separate problem. Is the crew deciding what's trash and what's somebody's belongings, or does someone tell you that before you show up? Because those sound like very different jobs and only one of them sounds like something I'd want two guys and a trailer doing on their own judgment.

Before either one, what does your insurance look like? I ask because I've been slow-walking my own first purchase and every vendor conversation I've had ended with someone asking for a certificate. If the answer is "I'm working on it," the choice between trash-outs and turnover might get made for you. Managers and servicers both seem to have a floor they won't go under, and I don't know that the floor is the same for a cleaner as it is for someone hauling appliances out of a basement.

@lantern do you know yet what the people you'd be pitching require?

I ran the turnover side of this for my own numbers when I was budgeting a first rental. The figure I kept landing on for a full tenant turnover was somewhere near $1,750 all in, and cleaning was maybe $300 of that. Paint, repairs, and the vacancy itself eat the rest.

Which tells you something about your ceiling. You're competing for a $300 slice of a $1,750 problem, and the owner cares more about the calendar than the $300. If you can clean a unit in 24 hours instead of five days, you're worth more than the cleaner charging $240.

The recurring side appeals to me more and I think it's because I've watched too many people with lumpy income get wrecked by a slow month. Twelve units a month at $280 is $3,360 you can plan around. One trash-out at $2,800 is a number you cannot plan around at all.

Though I'll admit I don't know whether PM work is actually as steady as it sounds or whether you just get bumped the first time someone cheaper answers the phone.

What actually gets a vendor added to my list isn't price. I need someone who answers a text on Saturday, gives me a flat number by unit type so I don't have to review hours, and finishes before the new tenant's move-in date I already committed to.

My honest count is that I've replaced cleaners four times in three years and every single time it was scheduling, never quality. If you show up when you said, you can be 15 percent above the last guy and I won't move.

@plumb the steadiness is real, but it's steady for the vendor who's reliable. It's not steady for the vendor who's cheap. Those are two different jobs.

One more thing @lantern. Don't pitch me in February with an empty calendar. Pitch me now and ask what my worst month for turnovers is, then be available in it.

Five years in on the service side and I did it in the order you're describing, trash-outs first, cleaning added later, and I'd do it the same way again for one reason. The big jobs taught me tonnage. You cannot price this work until you've been surprised by a dump scale a dozen times, and you learn that faster on hoarder houses than on empty apartments.

But @meridian is right about the float, and it nearly killed me in year two. I had $11,000 out on invoices to one national field services outfit and $600 in the account. What saved me was that the local investor work paid in a week and covered payroll while the paper caught up.

So my actual answer is trash-outs for the learning, local investors for the cash timing, and add PM turnover in year two once you have a second crew who can be somewhere at 8am without you. Doing all three from a standing start with two weekend guys is how people burn out in five months.

Worth calling your state and city before you pick, because the requirements aren't the same for the two paths and they vary by state. Some places treat hauling and disposal differently from janitorial work for registration purposes, and a few municipalities have their own hauler rules on top. Mine wanted a separate endorsement for debris hauling that had nothing to do with the cleaning side. Confirm with your own state and city, since none of this transfers.

Reading this whole thread as someone who wants income and not a second job: both of these are a job. A hard one. I'm not saying don't, I'm saying be honest that the thing you're buying with the first year is a wage, and the business shows up later if you build it on purpose.

Trades background here, and the thing I'd add is that trash-outs come with side revenue that cleaning doesn't. Appliances, copper, cast iron, the occasional decent tool. I've seen scrap and appliance resale from one house cover the dump bill outright. It doesn't change the strategy but it changes your margin on the heavy jobs, and it's a reason not to write them off just because tonnage is scary.

Also @compass, the personal property question is the real one in that whole conversation. Anybody hauling on a foreclosed property should have written direction from whoever hired them about what gets set aside, and requirements around abandoned belongings differ by state. That's a lawyer question for the contract, not something a crew improvises in a driveway.

Small portfolio, and I pay the person who answers. That's it. I've got a guy who charges more than anyone else and he has never once made me call twice.

I run four people and we do both, but the useful detail is that we don't do both on the same day with the same crew. Heavy days are heavy days. Turnovers are booked in blocks in the last week and first week of the month, because that's when leases end.

That calendar shape is actually the argument for doing both eventually. Turnovers cluster around month end. Trash-outs and REO work arrive whenever they arrive. The middle of the month is where the big jobs fit without breaking a promise to a manager.

@lantern with two weekend people you can't run that calendar yet. Pick the one you can be reliable at, get 90 days of never missing, then use those references to open the other door. Reliability is the only thing anyone in this business is buying.

Voted turnover, mostly because of what @trellis said about replacing cleaners over scheduling rather than quality. That sounds like a door that's open right now to anybody with a reliable calendar, and the trash-out side sounds like it needs equipment and a tonnage education first.

@thatch your version has me second-guessing though. Did the local investor work come from you calling them, or did the trash-out jobs put you in front of them?