Whether to clean turnovers yourself or hire a cleaner before the first guest

Question

Take a two bedroom near a small college town closing in six weeks. Local cleaners in a market like that typically quote 95 to 130 dollars per turn depending on whether linens are included. At 9 turns a month that is roughly 1,000 dollars a month off the top, real money against what a place like that will gross. The case for doing turnovers yourself the first season is real: an owner learns exactly how long a turn takes, what breaks, what guests actually leave behind, and what a fair scope looks like when hiring is finally the call. It also tells you whether your own standard matches what reviews demand, since cleanliness is the one review category that sinks a listing fast. The case for hiring from day one is just as real. Living an hour away with a full time job makes a same-day Sunday turn hard to promise, and an owner who is also the cleaner has built a business that stops the week they get sick. And once the cleaning fee charged to guests is netted out, the cash difference is usually smaller than the headline number suggests. The first season is where an operator decides whether they are buying the education or buying the reliability, and that answer tends to depend more on how much slack the operator's own schedule has than on the dollar gap itself.

laurenkim53 · Answer

In many rural markets the vote is often made for you. Calling around three small towns under 4,000 people can easily turn up exactly one person doing turnover work in two of them, and she's already booked for the summer by the cabins on the lake. So the choice becomes drive out and do it yourself, or find someone and pay above the going rate to keep them from leaving. Quill, 50 minutes each way is the number worth staring at. That's an hour forty of driving plus two to three hours in the house, so call it four hours a turn. Nine turns is 36 hours a month for about $1,000 saved. That's paying yourself under $30 an hour to do work that also creates a Sunday you can't control. The better move is usually to hire, and do the first four or five turns alongside the cleaner to learn what a proper turn includes. Linen counts, where the spare blinds cord lives, whether they restock the coffee. Then write that into the scope so the second cleaner (there's usually a second one) gets handed a standard instead of guessing.

Whether to clean turnovers yourself or hire a cleaner before the first guest

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