In-house cleaners on payroll or subcontracted turns? Where does that flip?

bramble, I think you're measuring the wrong variable. Unit count doesn't decide it, turns per week inside a tight radius does. Twenty units spread over four towns is still a subcontractor business because no employee can get between them in a four hour window. Eight units within fifteen minutes of each other with high summer occupancy might already justify two people on payroll, because you're buying schedule control rather than cheaper labor.

I ran the arithmetic on a hypothetical book last month for my own reasons. At 25 turns a week and an average $110 turn, that's $2,750 of weekly cleaning spend passing through. Two full time cleaners at, say, $22 an hour plus the employer side costs lands somewhere close to that, and now you own the slow weeks. If your occupancy swings from 85 percent in August to 40 percent in November, the fixed cost eats you in the off season and the subcontractor model doesn't.

So the real driver is seasonality plus density. Steady year-round demand and a tight cluster makes in-house survivable. Coastal or mountain markets with a four month peak, I'd stay variable and pay more per turn for it.

For anyone reading this cold, two terms are doing the work here.

A subcontracted cleaner is an independent business. They set their own hours, bring their own supplies in most cases, invoice per turn, and carry their own insurance. You pay the invoice and issue the appropriate year-end tax form. An employed cleaner works on your schedule with your tools, and you withhold taxes, pay the employer side of payroll taxes, and generally carry workers compensation coverage for them.

The money question in this thread sits on top of a legal question. Whether a given cleaner is legally an independent contractor or an employee depends on the test your state applies, and several states use a stricter test than the federal one. Calling someone a contractor in the agreement does not settle it. That determination belongs with an employment attorney or a payroll professional licensed in your state, and it should happen before you scale rather than after.

One mechanical point on the fee side. In most co-hosting agreements the cleaning fee guests pay is a pass-through to the cleaner and the co-host's percentage applies to the rental revenue only. Some agreements do it differently. Whichever way you structure it, write the definition into the agreement so the owner and the co-host are reading the same number at month end, and confirm the tax treatment of cleaning fees in your jurisdiction with a professional, because it varies.

I'm at nine units in one market and I've done both badly.

Started with three subcontracted crews because that's what everyone said. What actually happened is that my best crew took a full-time hotel job in month five and the replacement missed a checkout on a Friday of a holiday weekend. Guest arrived to the previous guest's towels. I refunded a night out of my own fee and drove out with a vacuum.

So I hired one person part time as a floater. Not a full crew, one person who handles the mess-ups and the mid-stay requests and the deep clean rotation. That single hire fixed about 80 percent of the pain for maybe $1,900 a month all in, and I still subcontract the routine volume. My accountant set up the payroll side and told me what my state expects, which I'd have gotten wrong on my own.

windlass is right about seasonality. My November occupancy is 41 percent. If I had four people on payroll in November I'd be paying them to sit.

The part that gets me looking at this from the paper side is what happens to the business if you have to sell or borrow against it. A co-hosting book with subcontracted labor and 30-day cancellation clauses on every owner agreement is thin collateral. Nobody underwrites that as a going concern. A book with employed staff, documented systems, and multi-year agreements looks more like an operating business, and it also looks like a business with real fixed obligations if the owner contracts churn.

So the in-house question isn't purely operational. It changes what you own at the end. I'd want to know how long the average owner agreement actually survives before I put anybody on payroll against it. If owners leave at 30 percent a year, your revenue is more variable than your payroll and that gap is where operators get hurt.

I've run subs and I've run guys on the truck, and here's the part that gets skipped: in-house doesn't save money on labor. It costs more per hour, always. What it buys is that when I say be there at 11, they're there at 11, and if the job takes 40 extra minutes nobody renegotiates in the driveway.

On the construction side I learned that the moment you have your own people, you have to feed them. Every week. That means you become a salesman for your own crew's hours, and if the work dries up you're either eating the cost or laying people off, which wrecks your ability to hire the next time. Cleaning is the same shape with smaller numbers.

quarry's floater setup is the version I'd copy. One person you actually control, volume stays variable. That's how the good remodelers I know staff, one or two employees who can do anything and subs for the rest.

Reading this as somebody deciding where money goes rather than swinging the mop, the interesting thing is that the two models are different businesses with the same revenue line. Subcontracted is a brokerage. You match owners to labor and get paid for coordination and pricing. In-house is a service company with fixed cost and operating leverage, which means it scales better and breaks harder.

The pricing side is what would decide it for me. If your edge as a co-host is dynamic pricing and getting the listing seen, cleaning is a cost center you should outsource and forget. If your edge is that guests give you fives on cleanliness in a market where everybody else gets fours, then cleaning is the product and you should own it.

bramble, before you pick, I'd ask which of those two you're actually selling to owners. Most of the pitches I've seen lead with revenue optimization and then lean on cleaning behind the scenes to keep the reviews up, and those operators end up hiring whether they planned to or not.