If you’ve had a short-term rental for any time and all, well, then you probably know that housekeeping can be a bit challenging.

And I say can, because if you have an excellent relationship with your housekeeper or with your housekeeping company, then your life and your property and your investment will be much, much easier.

So this week, we’re going to break down hiring a new housekeeper, seven steps with everything in between, things that you need to know to make sure that you establish a great relationship that you can have for years and years to come.

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

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Welcome back to the show.

If you’re just joining us for the first time, I’m glad you found us.

My team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests in nearly 20 cities now.

We’ve learned a lot about housekeeping.

It is one of the biggest pieces when it comes to managing our short term rentals.

One of the biggest pieces, biggest operational pieces.

And so we’re going to break down seven steps this week, where to find them, setting the right expectations, and really just establishing a great relationship.

It’s been some time since I’ve hired my own housekeeper.

In fact, I’ve had a housekeeping manager that’s helped me with my personal portfolio for over eight years.

It’s been an amazing relationship.

And now I’m establishing a new one down here in Brazil.

Yes, most of my properties are in the US and most of the properties we manage for partners.

But I do spend a lot of time down here and I did start investing down here.

And so we just hired our first Brazilian housekeeper, and the process is exactly the same as it is in the US or anywhere in the world.

Setting the expectations are the same.

All of it’s pretty much the same except for the language, of course.

And that’s because the way we operate a short term rental in one country versus the other, it’s the same.

So let’s go ahead and get into it.

Step number one, we’ve got to find a great housekeeper.

And so there’s multiple places to do that, but I always recommend starting with referrals for any trade, really.

So whether you’re looking for a plumber, electrician, a housekeeper, starting with referrals is the best place to go.

But we don’t always have a referral, right?

So where do we go if we’re just starting from scratch?

You may be familiar with a few new software tools that popped up.

Over the years, one is called Turno, used to be called Turnover BNB.

They have a network of over 50,000 housekeepers inside their platform.

And so I would highly suggest take a look at that program.

There’s another one called Properly that also has their own network of housekeepers.

But if you’re not using one of these software tools, you don’t plan on using one, well, then you can also go to places like Facebook groups, any social media groups around short term rentals.

You could even go as far as reaching out to co-hosts in your area where your Airbnb or your property is located.

How do you do that?

Well, you can simply look up other properties, find the ones that have co-hosts.

So if you scroll down, you’ll see the host information.

If there’s a co-host, you’ll see that there’s someone there helping that property owner.

And many times those co-hosts might have a housekeeping company or they might work with one.

They would be open to sharing with you.

Not all the time, but it’s worth a shot.

You can simply send them a message.

There’s a little contact, the host button on Airbnb, so you can send them a message and just reach out.

It never hurts to try, right?

So several options there, always starting with referrals.

So once we found our housekeeper, there’s really two different approaches here.

We can hire someone independently or we can hire a company where there’s going to be multiple people working for that company.

So we’re going to go with the scenario here that you’re hiring an individual because this is where you’re going to have to set a little more expectations than you might working with a housekeeping company that has been doing this for a while and that has lots of housekeepers.

So let’s say you got a great reference from a friend of yours.

The first thing to ask yourself is, is this person really familiar working with short term rentals?

Because remember, a traditional housekeeper that may come once a week and help you clean your home versus someone that works specifically with short term rentals?

Well, those are quite different.

And so that’s the first thing we want to ask.

If this person’s new to housekeeping for short term rentals, then we’re gonna have to do an extra good job at setting these expectations.

One of the first expectations you can set right off the bat with your new housekeeper is how many turns do you expect?

So how often do you expect a guest to be checking out of your property?

If it’s a brand new property, well, you can use programs like AirDNA or Price Labs to get an idea of the market to see what the average reservation length is and what the average occupancy is.

If you’ve had your property for a while, well, then you already have a pretty good idea, right?

Starting off with just that is a great expectation, because let’s say you have 60 checkouts a year and you’re hiring an individual.

Is she or he going to be available for all those times?

If not, we wanna make sure we have a backup.

We always wanna have backups, but I’ll get to that a little bit later.

Next expectation, of course, we wanna establish a price for the turnover, right?

But sometimes that’s not always cut and dry.

Is your price going to include laundry?

Are there machines on the property that can handle all the laundry?

Is it a really large home where maybe the checkout window or the time between your guests checking out and the next one checking in isn’t long enough to actually do all the laundry there?

Well, then you very likely are probably gonna have to pay more for some offsite laundry or some things like that.

We did actually do a whole episode just dedicated to laundry because it can be a bit challenging depending on your property and your setup.

That was episode 185, so make sure you go back and check that one out if you missed it.

Again, you can see all of our past episodes at strriches.com.

We also have a real handy little bot there in the bottom right corner where you can just ask it, hey, what do you recommend in regards to laundry options?

And it knows all of the content we’ve been producing for almost five years now.

So back to expectations, we wanna establish how much work this housekeeper, housekeeping company could expect from us, what the cost per turn would be, and whether they’re going to be doing laundry on site or if they’re doing it offsite, if there’s an additional cost to that.

We want to set the expectations around pets.

Does your property allow pets?

Well, some housekeepers aren’t too fond of cleaning up after our furry friends.

Others have no problem at all.

But again, it’s one other thing that you wanna discuss up front.

How are you going to handle supplies?

So if you’re working with a professional housekeeping company, one of the benefits is that they’re pretty much across the board going to be purchasing all of their own supplies, which makes that part a little bit easier.

But if you’re working with an individual, well, are you gonna be shipping supplies to them?

Are they gonna be purchasing them, and you’re reimbursing them?

One other thing that you wanna make sure you get squared away up front.

What happens if someone shows up your property and maybe they wanted a little extra cleaning, or they thought the property wasn’t that clean?

Is your housekeeper or the company you’re working with, are they willing to go back out to the property?

Or is there gonna be some other fee associated around that?

One other thing that you wanna bring up, because this is also an excellent opportunity to see how much time or how willing your housekeeper is to help you out with some of those little management tasks, not necessarily managing the guests, but going back to check up on the property and how much notice do they need, another expectation that we’ll need to know.

Depending on how you accept reservations, you may have a buffer before a reservation, so you could let your housekeeper know, hey, you always have at least one or two days notice, but if you’re really trying to squeeze all the revenue out of the property, then you wanna make sure your calendar’s fully open, and you’re gonna need a housekeeper that’s available last minute, or if they’re not available last minute, they have someone that can help them out.

So those are some of the basic expectations you’re gonna wanna set, regardless whether you’re working with a housekeeping company or with an individual.

Step three, we need to know about our linens, and this step is actually, there’s quite a bit to it, so we did a whole episode on it last week, that was episode 242.

Go back and check that one out if you missed it.

Basically, in a nutshell, we need to know where we’re keeping extra linens, what happens if they get stained, so on and so on.

So again, another expectation, you’re gonna need to set up front.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years.

My team and I have managed thousands of guests, we’ve learned a ton, and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat.

We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation.

We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee.

If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com.

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

Just click on the property management button, and we look forward to chatting with you soon.

Okay, step number four in the process is discussing potential issues that can come up with your housekeeper.

Not necessarily with your housekeeper in terms of their work.

We’ll get to that later on.

But your housekeeper’s showing up, and maybe the guest is still there.

Maybe your housekeeper shows up, and the guest answers the door naked.

Yes, we’ve had this happen, and lots of crazy stuff happened, so it’s good to get it out there.

If your housekeeper’s brand new to the industry, this is gonna be brand new to them, right?

Hopefully, you’ve found a housekeeper that’s already experienced in the industry, because all of these expectations and things will be a little bit easier.

That’s not our case down here in Brazil, so we’re working with the housekeeper that is new to short-term rentals, so we have to talk about these things, right?

Because we don’t want them to be a surprise, and we need to have a way to handle that.

If she shows up or he shows up, and the guest is still there, what do they do?

Another potential thing that will happen when your housekeeper show up your property is that they’re gonna discover that the prior guest left something there, and they’re gonna need to know what to do with that, right?

And so just one other thing to mention, sometimes they’re gonna show up, and your property might have a little bit of damage.

How are they gonna report that back to you?

Sometimes the guests that show up are gonna say the property was dirty.

Your housekeeper is gonna say, no way, I spent hours cleaning that, it was spotless, and it’s really just gonna be a, he said, she said thing.

How do we handle that?

Well, at the end of the day, we are running a hospitality business.

We need to keep that in mind, right?

We need to make sure that our guests have a good experience.

And so sometimes you might have to pay your housekeeper to go out and clean the property again, even though it was already clean.

Again, this is something else we’ll want to discuss with the housekeeper just to set that expectation and let them know, hey, we know that you do an excellent job, but sometimes guests have totally different expectations.

Sometimes they might even be making it up.

We never know, but it’s something that’s going to come up.

You might also show up at the property and sometimes it’s super clean.

It doesn’t even seem like someone’s been there, but then there’s going to be other times where you show up and it’s going to be quite dirty.

Maybe they got a little carried away.

They were drinking and they left all their trash out.

Hopefully you’re doing a good job vetting your guests before they check in.

But the reality is is that we all have different cleanliness standards, right?

If we think about just friends and acquaintances and people that we’ve known throughout our lives, we all live differently, right?

One good way is to just take a look at someone’s car.

How do they treat their car, right?

If you’re hiring a housekeeper and they show up in a car and they open the door and you see soda bottles and stuff like that in their car and their car’s quite dirty, that’s probably not a good sign, right?

You probably want a housekeeper that’s showing up and they’ve got a nice spick and span car.

So just set those expectations.

Sometimes your property is not gonna be in great shape.

Sometimes it’s gonna be nice and spick and span.

Okay, on to step number five.

So we’ve talked about where to find housekeepers.

We’ve talked about setting expectations, getting on the same page in regards to pricing and laundry.

Talked about step three, linens and how those are going to be handled.

Step four, we’re talking to our housekeeper about potential issues that could arise with the guests at our property or them leaving something behind.

Number five, we wanna talk about actually scheduling the cleaning and our communication with the housekeeper and how that’s going to happen on a normal basis.

If you’ve tuned in to the show before, well, you’ve undoubtedly heard us talk about an app called Breezeway.

That’s what our team and I use to manage all the housekeepers that we work with.

It’s really great.

It’s designed for housekeeping and maintenance.

It’s got a great little checklist that our housekeepers can open when they show up to the property.

It can require them to take photos.

You can create a checklist as detailed as you want or as simple as you’d like.

There are other platforms established for this now.

We talked about Turno and Properly.

Those are two others.

So you really have three great options now for scheduling your housekeeping with your housekeeper that takes a lot of the legwork out of the way, right?

This can be connected to your property management software.

So when you get a reservation, your housekeeper is going to see it automatically.

These tools also help you cover some of those issues that arise, right?

Those checklists, ensuring that your property is clean and that it gets cleaned the same way that the coffee filter gets removed from the coffee machine.

So we like to use technology for this.

Of course, this depends on how many properties you have.

So the more properties you have, the more necessary a tool like this would be.

If you’re just getting started, well, you could simply communicate through text message.

You could simply communicate over the phone.

You could use a program like Slack, which my team and I also use.

I find it’s really, really helpful because it allows us to include multiple people in the same group.

We can share photos there.

We can share documents, whatever we need to.

And as you grow, this can be a really good tool for internal communication.

They also have a free version.

So it’s not an extra expense that you’ll need to incur.

Depending on what property management software you’re using, some of these have built in task related functions like Guesty and WeUseHostAway.

And there’s a lot of programs out there, and a lot of them have this built in.

But remember, those other three programs that I mentioned, Properly, Turno and Breezeway, those are designed specifically for housekeeping.

And so in my opinion, they still do a much better job than a lot of the built in functions you might find with your property management software.

One last note on using Checklist before we jump into step number six, is that remember when you’re starting out with a new housekeeper or new housekeeping company, we really want to be more thorough and then ease up afterwards.

So to give you an example of that, maybe you have a barbecue and your housekeeper forgot to clean it once or maybe twice.

Adding that item into a checklist afterwards is a little more difficult than starting off with a checklist that already has that item in there and then removing it afterwards once your housekeeper has done a great job time and time again.

Really, the more time we work with the housekeeper, the more we trust them, the less we really need to check in and make sure that they’re adding new soap to the soap dispensers in the bathrooms and doing all these little things, right?

So we really want to start off with a more thorough checklist and more thorough sort of guidelines about how we expect our property to be clean and then sort of ease off as we build our relationship together.

Okay, on to step number six.

This is really where we’re going to make it official, and this is to get our agreement in writing.

Now, you don’t have to have a lawyer draw up a contract and send it over to them and make it super, super official and formal, but you do want to have it in writing, right?

So this could be through text message, this could be through email, whatever it happens to be.

Our team does use a contract and an agreement.

Check with your lawyer and your advisor as to whether your housekeeper is technically an employee or you can count them as a 1099 contractor.

Our agreement for hiring our housekeepers is very clear that they’re working for us as a contractor.

And it also has all of these expectations, our rates and potential issues and things that come up right into our agreement.

So it’s one last place for us to review everything we’ve talked about to make sure we’re on the same page.

In your agreement or in your text or in your email or in your written communication, you also want to make sure that you’ve talked about how and when you’re actually going to pay your housekeeper.

So you’re going to pay them after every turn.

The program Turno does a great job.

I know a lot of housekeepers love using it because they get paid automatically right after each turn.

My team and I, we pay our housekeepers for my personal portfolio every other week.

And so you just want to establish that up front, make sure you’re all on the same page, and then send it through in some sort of written communication.

So you can always refer back to it later on if you need to.

Okay, so one last step, but let’s just do a quick recap.

So we talked about where to find your housekeepers.

That was step number one, and whether you’re hiring an individual or a housekeeping company.

We talked about setting expectations in regards to how much you’re going to be paying, how often you expect your property to need cleaning, those sorts of things.

We touched real briefly on linens, but remember we have a full episode on that.

That’s last week’s episode number 242.

So go back and check that one out if you missed it.

In step four, we talked about potential issues or things that come up in regards to your guests staying in your property.

So these were things like them not checking out on time.

In step five, we talked about scheduling and how we are going to be communicating with our housekeeper or the housekeeping company on a regular basis.

Are we going to use an app design for this or are we going to simply use the phone or text message?

And then in step six, we summarized everything that we’ve talked about to make sure we’re on the same page.

And we sent it over in some sort of written form, ideally in a contract for your housekeeper to where they could simply sign.

There’s lots of easy digital sign programs out there these days.

And remember, if you are hiring them on a contract basis, you want to make sure that you get a W9 form filled out with them so that you have that when it comes time for your tax filings.

And the seventh step here is really just a reminder.

It’s a reminder that your housekeeper or the housekeeping company that you’re working with is crucial to your success as a short-term rental owner or investor.

And so we really need to nurture the relationship and do a good job of making sure that we’re both on the same team, right?

If some issues arise, we want to be there to make sure that we can help them.

The reality is that after working just a few times at your property, your new housekeeper is going to understand the whole process.

They’re going to understand your property.

In fact, they’re going to start or learn your property much better than you know it yourself.

Sometimes they’re going to show up to the property, and if it’s not in super great condition, well, it’s going to affect them, right?

Like they’re there at your property cleaning, taking care of it.

It becomes their property essentially.

And so we want to establish this relationship, understand both sides, have everything clearly laid out, understand that it’s going to change too, right?

Inflation is a real thing.

Rates are going to change.

The tools that we might be using could change.

And so we want to just build along good relationship with them.

If they have a maintenance person that they prefer to work with, well, that could be one other way to kind of secure that relationship in, right?

So if something pops up, they just call the maintenance person.

That can help make your life a lot easier.

Are you planning on building your short-term rental portfolio or adding more properties?

Well, that’s a good thing to be very transparent with your housekeeper about, right?

Hopefully, they can help accommodate you.

Maybe they can even bring other people on to work underneath them.

So I hope these seven steps sort of just wrapped it up for you in a nutshell.

Obviously, there are some other things that I’m sure I left out, but we do have a lot of other podcasts or episodes or shows dedicated to housekeeping.

So make sure you go to strriches.com.

You can check those out.

And in a future episode, we are going to be talking about challenges working with your housekeeper.

So let’s say they are dropping the ball when it comes to cleanliness or reliability.

These things pop up.

So we’re going to talk about those, the most common ones that come up, how to handle it, and when to know if it’s time to just find another housekeeper.

So until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week, and we’ll see you back here soon.

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