Tips on How to Keep Your Vacation or Residential Rental Property Clean

When it comes to your home, you do your best to keep it clean, for the most part… but sometimes life gets in the way. You have a full-time job that you go to every day, and then when you get off of work, you come home and have to take the kids to soccer practice and baseball practice. On top of that, you have to prepare dinner as well! With all of those responsibilities on your plate, keeping a clean home is the last of your concerns… you do good enough just trying to keep your sanity, let alone worrying about a little dust on the coffee table!

That’s just your level of cleanliness for your own home. When it comes to rental properties, you have to have a whole new mindset as far as cleanliness is concerned. So let’s say you’re thinking about renting a property out for extra income. You can either rent out your own home or you can finance a rental property (most people choose to finance a rental property because they don’t want to rent their home out). Whichever financial route you choose to take, the aspect of keeping the rental property clean is what is most important. You may keep your own home semi-clean (and that’s based on your own standards) but in the world of rental properties, semi-clean is unacceptable.

Your level of cleanliness for your rental will be dependent upon how you plan on listing your rental property. Is your rental property going to be listed as a vacation rental property? Or is it going to simply be listed as a residential rental property? This is an important factor to know because it will determine how often it needs to be cleaned.

Vacation Rental

If you list your rental as a vacation rental property, it will need to be cleaned as soon as a guest checks out. Sites like Airbnb are great for listing vacation rentals but because it’s such a popular resource for vacation rentals, you might have guests checking out one day and another guest wanting to vacation there a few days later, so you’ll need to have a quick clean up turn around!

An unclean rental and no wifi are two of the biggest complaints among guests who stay in vacation rentals. Those two aspects are almost comparable to vacation rental nightmares. For one, most people would say that they could have stayed home if they wanted to stay in a dirty house. Secondly, the idea of people spending their vacation on a property where there’s no wifi makes for a bad vacation all around, and you can definitely count on a bad review.

But nonetheless, if you list your rental property as a vacation rental, you are going to have to continually keep it clean… clean as hotel standards.

Residential Rental

If you plan on listing your rental property as a residential rental property, you can breathe a little easier. With a residential rental, you can look at yourself as a landlord because the people who rent from you will be staying in your property on more of a long-term basis. With that being said, you will only need to make your rental property spic-and-span while people are touring your home. Once you’ve made your decision on who you want to rent it out to, it will be up to your tenants to keep it clean until they move out.

From the standpoint of being the owner of a rental property or vacation property, how clean you keep your property is going to determine your success in the rental property industry. People are not going to want to rent from you if your property is filthy… it’s all about presentation. Take a look at some of the best ways to keep your rental property clean.

Put In a Little Elbow Grease

Putting in a little elbow grease is good for renting out a residential rental property simply because you only have to do it once, for the most part. So get a box of gloves, rags, cleaning solutions, and trash bags and get it done. It’s really not as bad as it may seem and if you think about it, it will pay off because you’re spending a few hours to get your property presentable only to reap the benefits of renters paying you every month… that’s really not a bad tradeoff if you think about it.

Help the Cleaners Out

Now, above it was mentioned that you won’t have to lift a finger, and you won’t, as far as cleaning is concerned but if you need your rental property turned around pretty quick, you should help the cleaning staff out by picking up behind your guests and putting things back in its original place.

If there are towels everywhere, place them in a location like the bathtub, where they can all be together. If there are dishes, toys, or furniture out of place, put the furniture back in place along with those things back in place to help the cleaners out a bit.

Skip the Elbow Grease and Hire the Pros

Okay, so this is totally contradicting the elbow grease from above… but it’s actually not because you’re only calling in the pros if you list your property as a vacation rental. If your vacation rental property is well taken care of and people love it, you’re not going to have time to put in the amount of elbow grease that’s needed to maintain your rental.

A professional cleaning service will be able to come in after guests have left and do a full cleaning of your rental property. You’ll have to check the guidelines of what services are performed, depending on the company you choose to go with, but you can rest assured that the cleaning service you go with will be able to get your property cleaned without you having to lift a finger.

Published in: Home advice | Author: Yanita