Laundry Trouble? Efficient Options for your Short Term Rental

arguably one of the biggest pieces of our housekeeping turnover with our short-term rentals is laundry and it can be a bottleneck it can be a pain in the butt there are several ways luckily to handle this so I want to talk this week about efficient laundry options for your short-term rental 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 welcome back to

the short-term rental Rich's podcast one of the biggest challenges with our housekeeping is our laundry now of course like everything the more properties we have in our short terminal portfolio the more these little challenges become big challenges and if you're building a portfolio if you have several properties already well you've probably discovered that your laundry operations can be a bit of a bottleneck so we're going to talk about three ways that we can efficiently be doing laundry and the ways where most people are doing their

laundry now some of the challenges and some of the benefits which with each of those options so the first one is just doing laundry in your property and now this might have been the only thing that you thought of if you have a vacation rental and your housekeeper shows up and it takes them about two to three hours to clean the property well they can easily throw the laundry in the washing machine and when they're done cleaning all of their Linens hopefully are nice and clean

but what if that property happens to have four bedrooms they can't possibly fit all of that Linen in one load so that creates some issues and what might happen is that your housekeeper tries to put too much laundry in one load which causes a bit of damage engine definitely causes more awaren wear and tear on your machines that are not built for washing giant loads of laundry day in and day out so that's one thing that can happen the other thing that could happen is that

your housekeeping expenses go up a lot because you have housekeepers waiting there for the laundry to be finished maybe they've cleaned the whole house already but the laundry is not dry yet and that's usually what takes the most time with residential machine is the drying we're going to get to some of the other options here too one of the things that I find interesting is that commercial machines a lot of laundry mats for example they let you dry your Linens for free because those machines do

such a good job so we're going to get to commercial options here in a quick second so if you have a large home that needs multiple loads of laundry then it's going to be really difficult for your housekeeper to get all those done in a timely manner especially if you have other guests checking in so what can you do well pretty easy you just buy extra sets of linen right your housekeeper shows up they put all the new linens on the property and then you don't

have that Rush going on if there's not another guest checking in then they can still get the lawn done and leave the fresh ones there but sometimes we have to go off site to finish our laundry and that can be a really good option for both you no other trips to a laundromat or anything required but if your short-term rental or your short-term rentals just have too much laundry then we have to look at other options and so that brings me to our second option which

is doing our laundry off-site if you missed our episode on Linens you should definitely go back and check that out it's episode 167. we've learned a lot managing tens of thousands of guests we learned a lot about Linens so I have all my best tips and tricks in that episode we also kind of debunk the myth around thread counts I know you've seen lennons out there that say they're 1200 thread count or 1500 thread count and they're on Amazon for 39 that just doesn't add up

so we talk about thread count and really the the max thread count that any of us need in our properties go back and check out episode 167 if you haven't already so if your housekeeper doesn't have the ability to do all the Linens in your short-term rental then they've got to go off site right they can do it at home which could be a good solution but the reality is these machines we have at home residential laundry machines they're not built to be doing tons and

tons of pounds of laundry day in and day out so a good second option can be to go to a laundromat to Outsource to a laundromat too and so there's a few ways to do this some laundromats offer what they call a wash and fold service where you can simply drop off all your Linens or your housekeeper could drop off all the Linens at whatever laundromat you guys decide on and that laundromat can do all the service for you they usually charge per pound the other

option is to have your housekeeper or maybe the housekeeping company you're working with actually do the laundry there in the laundromat and most laundromats these days have some really large machines 80 100 pound machines and it's more efficient it's less wear and tear on the machines in the property and it actually does a better job of cleaning the Linens too these machines are built for commercial use so they can run hotter temperatures they can use strong chemicals they just do a better job of cleaning so

that's the second option your housekeeper or the housekeeping company you're working with can be dropping off the Linens at a laundromat and either laundromats doing them or they're doing them as well and just bringing them back with them the next time they're at the property so if you've been listening to the podcast for a while then you probably know I mentioned a few times and I went out and purchased a commercial property with plans to turn it into a laundromat I actually learned so much about

laundromats I think they're a really fascinating investment and they they can make a lot of sense they have a they're a real estate play but it can also really help us with our short-term rental portfolio so that's sort of the natural progression for a lot of people that are building big short-term rental portfolios if they're not Outsourcing everything so I didn't actually turn that property into full public laundromat but I did end up buying four industrial sized machines and these things are like tanks I mean

they literally they brought them in on forklifts they're bolted to the ground because if not they'll just spin out of control and they do a lot of laundry and they do it really quickly so I know not everyone needs that or has that option but we do have a lot of experience with the laundry and going to a laundromat can be the next best thing if laundry become a bottleneck for you but there's also another service that's really becoming more popular now and that's a pickup

in delivery service so I learned a lot about this too when I was doing the research for the property and and thinking about opening the laundromat a pickup and delivery service is basically a company that goes around on regular schedules picks up your Linens washes them and brings them back and I've worked with companies doing this as well I would say that it was very expensive and the particular company that I was working with wasn't very consistent and so we took it in-house and we started

doing our own and we have much cleaner consistent Linens all of the time but this is worth looking into because especially in every Big City there are lots of these services is around these are the same Services a lot of hotels use a lot of hotels Outsource their laundry and linens too so if laundry is a bit of a bottleneck for you I encourage you to just do a quick Google search see if there's any pickup and delivery options available for you and you might find

that they're more reasonable than the one that I worked with one of the other benefits to using a laundromat as well or to doing your Linens off-site is that you can soak any soiled Linens so what do I mean by this if if you have a big stain and a linen and you don't have time to wash that in the property or maybe your housekeeping companies just throwing it out knowing that it's stained well you can if someone's doing it off site you can soak those

overnight you can use some high concentrate bleach that you can order off amazon.com and then wash that Linen in a commercial machine and a lot of times you can recover those Linens that you thought were damaged now off the linens are actually damaged I would definitely recommend filing a resolution if you happen to be on Airbnb or if you're working on one of the other OTAs we should be charging for these things if someone's ruined Linens maybe not a little hand towel here or washcloth there

but if someone's actually ruining your lens it's totally understandable and reasonable to be charging for those so I encourage you to do that if you're not doing that already okay so those are the laundry options in a nutshell if you're just getting started you have one short-term rental and it's not a huge massive home then laundry is probably not that big of an issue for you but I know that you're going to have stained Linens from time to time and so maybe you can try some

of these other things to recover some of those Linens and and take them every once in a while to a off-site laundromat if your property's too big to be doing linens on site well we definitely want to make sure that we always have fresh copies of Lin for housekeepers to change right so that they can show up and there's no risk and not having Linens for our next guest but the second option is for your housekeepers or the company you're working with to do the Linens

off-site to do all the laundry off site and there's several ways to do that so they can drop off the Linens and use what's called a wash and fold service they can actually do it themselves in the property or you might want to do a quick Google search to see if there's a pickup and delivery service in your neighborhood in your city that's offering this service as well and for those of you out there that are really scaling your portfolio or you have a lot of

properties in the same area it's a natural progression if you're doing housekeeping in-house that you are probably going to want to invest in some sort of industrial commercial machines because they do a better job washing they do more at the same time it's more efficient they save a ton of water actually so I guess it's better for the environment as well they dry your Linens so so quickly I mentioned that a lot of laundromats will actually allow you to use their dryers for free because the

washers spin the Linens so quickly that they basically wring out all of the water requiring hardly any dry time the bigger machines also allow you to run at hotter temperatures and use different and stronger chemicals so these are kind of the laundry options hopefully it hasn't been a huge challenge for you but at some point in your scr Journey your operations have to change a little bit to handle the workload so I hope that gave you a little bit of insight and until next time I

hope you have a wonderful week Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that's r e s t methods.com