How to Hire An Airbnb Cleaning Team

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What's up guys, it's James here. And in today's video, we're gonna do things a little bit different. I have a free Facebook group, which I'll leave a link to in the in the description down below, which is basically just a group that we've created for short term rental investors. And in that group, we do live trainings every single week. And so I've got one of the live trainings that was super popular, people seem to really, really love it get a tonne of value from it. And I just want to share it with you guys on my audience here on YouTube as well. It's a live training that I did in the group on how to hire, manage, and make sure that you maintain quality with a really great cleaning team. So we go through all of my steps for finding hiring and training the best possible cleaning team for your short term rental property. So I'm just going to go ahead and we'll cut over to that training so that you can check that out. Before we do, I just want to remind you guys again, if you want to join that group and see these trainings, when they're live, every single week, we run live trainings, everything is completely free. So you can check it out, the link will be in the description down below to join that group. And then also, if you guys are interested in learning more about specifically how to invest successfully in short term rental properties, I'd highly recommend checking out the link in the description down below for our free training on exactly how to do that. And if you liked this video, if you get value from it, if you want to see more videos like this, let me know by hitting that like button, commenting down below with any questions, anything you have, and hit the subscribe button to stay up to date with the channel. With all that being said, let's flip right over to the live training. So let's go ahead and let's get started. So yeah, in today's training, we're gonna be talking all the cleaning teams. So how to hire them, how to manage them, how to maintain really good quality with them. And, and also just different tools and systems that we use for for them, as well as for linens, which I find is a sort of a big point of question, oftentimes to bring up how to do linens, and so people are kind of wanting to figure that out. So I'm going to do a screen share here. And let's jump over and just kind of dive right into it started talking about the systems that I use for, for cleaning. Now I'm just going to before I jump in here, I'm going to pull this up on my phone, just so I'm not kind of switching in between tabs here and can see any questions that people so let me share my screen here. And let's jump in. So this is basically where I'm going to start is going to be our rockstar cleaning team hiring checklist, our cheat sheet that we have, that we use internally for ourselves with our clients. This is what we do for actually selecting a cleaning team. And so basically, you want to outsource cleaning right away. Like it's one of the lowest leverage activities that you as a as a short term rental investor can be doing. So obviously, you don't want to be doing it yourself. We want to be outsourcing it right away. And we're looking for a team that can grow along with our business. So if we're adding on more listings, if that is the goal, we want a clean team that can ideally grow with that business. And we're also looking for experienced cleaners so that we're not going to be having to train them how to actually clean a place, we might have to train them some of the systems for organising properly, but we don't want to have to clean them how to actually clean, we want them to have fair prices, we want to be able to be to be willing and able to take on consistent work, that's a big one. So likely companies out there are not going to be used to cleaning more than like once a month or once every two weeks for clients. So having something that is more consistent, have a cleaning team that's okay with that is a big one. And the cleaning team, the number one most important thing is that the Clean team be super, super reliable, because of the cleaning team is is not showing up to cleaning or showing up late, you know knocking stuff down on time, like that's going to that's where really a sort of a wrench gets thrown into everything. So reliability is the number one most important thing. We also want them to obviously be consistent to communicate really effectively, and take ownership of their work and their scheduling. So pretty high standards that we have, I think like the cleaning team often gets looked at as like, hey, let's just hire a theme team and set it and forget it. But really, they're kind of the they're the main face of your business, they're one of the biggest kind of determinants in how satisfied your guests are, how good your reviews are going to be. So it is really important that they do a good job, they're also sort of the eyes and the IRS at your property. So it's important that they be able to communicate effectively. And that as things come up maintenance issues, anything like that, that they're able to deal with that effectively. So the cost is obviously it's going to vary by property and by by location. So ideally that's going to be covered by cleaning fees paid by the guests. And so what I've found to be the case is that a lot of people go well I you know, the cleaning company is charging me X amount and I can't I can't possibly charge that much for cleaning in my area like you know, people aren't going to pay it. What I've found is that you've got to look around number one shopping around for different themes. If you've only talked to one then you probably don't have a good idea of what the price really should be. But you've got Do you want to look around and generally, there's going to be like sort of a norm for what the price is going to be depending on the size of property. Now, generally, there's going to be a minimum threshold for a cleaning company to even come by. So it becomes more economical to clean larger properties than smaller ones. Because if you have a studio, you know, it might not take that long to actually clean the studio, but the cleaning company, you know, if they're good, they're going to want to charge a base rate, because we're not going to want to come by for like, $30, it's not worth their time and energy and their gas money to even come by the property. So you're just gonna have sort of a floor. But what I found is that, if you charge a cleaning fee, that is equal to or less than the going rate for professional cleaning in your area, it should not have a negative impact on your bookings. Now, if you do charge a cleaning fee that is greater than the going rate for professional cleaning in your area, then generally speaking, you will have a negative impact on on bookings. The reason for that a lot of people look at other hosts in their area, and they go, Well, no one's charging a cleaning fee, that's not true. It's just the ones that you're looking at, that aren't charging any fee, excuse me, in an average market, you're still gonna have lots of hosts that are charging any fee, but they're all gonna be charging relatively the same amount. And so if you start charging more than them, because usually that's going to be in line with whatever the the going rate is for professional cleaning in that area. So if you start charging more than that, then suddenly you have a cleaning fee that's higher than anyone else in the area, that is gonna have a negative impact on bookings. And then if you, if you start charging at or less than, then you shouldn't have any issues there. Now, I also recommend just right across the board to never allow less than a than a two night stay set for some very kind of small exceptions to that if you have a really small property that like does a lot of business travel, maybe maybe, but for most situations, I don't recommend less than a than a two night stay. Mostly the reason for that is to avoid issues, but then it also becomes a lot more economical for both you and for the guests. Because if you have a if you have a purchasing for three nights, and they pay, let's say $100 cleaning fee, then it's not $100 added on to their nightly rate, which may even double their nightly rate, it's going to be $100 on top of their three night rate, which is a much smaller amount relative to what they're paying per night. And then also for your cleaners, it's just a lot more a lot easier for them to go by and not have to be going out every single night. So it is it is just kind of a lot better that way. Now what's the actual hiring process. So it is really a numbers game, you have to speak to a lot of people. In order to get a really great thing team you can't expect for the first person that you ever reach out to to be a great cleaning team. So the best place to start looking for for a good cleaning team is to be it's just online with a Google search for cleaning companies in your area. And just look for small medium sized companies. Ideally teams with experience cleaning Airbnb. So you can just go and type in Hey, like short term rental cleaning, or Airbnb cleaning, vacation rental cleaning, vacation, home cleaning, like all those different search terms for your area and see what comes up. Now a lot of times the ones that come up first are going to be the most in demand because they've actually got SEO figured out they've got a lot of a lot of info leads, and so they're gonna be the busiest they're going to be the most expensive. That doesn't mean that they're not a good place to look. It just means that it's that you'll want to supplement with looking elsewhere. So the next best place to look is online classifieds, ads. So looking at like in Canada, we've got Kijiji and Craigslist, in a lot of the world, Craigslist exists over the UK, in Europe, you've got like Gumtree. So like looking for those online classifieds. You can also look in Facebook groups is another good way if there's like local Facebook groups, or like Airbnb community in your area, to get referrals from other hosts. So again, that the whole goal here is like at the top of the funnel, we want to get as many people in as possible because we want to get as many potential companies that we're screening so that we can screen really thoroughly and ended up selecting one. If you start out by only contacting three cleaning companies, then you can only screen two of them, you're just taking the one that's not the worst, right? Like you're not taking the best cleaning company, you're taking the least bad one. And what we want to be doing is taking the best but we want to start out with 1020 cleaning companies that we're looking at so that we can really filter through and confidently say like, this is the best cleaning company that is the best fit. And so that's that, that screening process. So that's sort of the next step is once you've actually sourced several potential cleaning teams, ask them for their standard rates for turning over a one, a two, a three or four bedroom property, get all those rates off of them, and then ask them what they offer discounts based on volume. So basically, the goal here is that we're going to eliminate any outliers. So anyone that charges like half of what a normal cleaning company is charging, you know that you're going to get what you pay for and you're going to not want to go with those. Anyone charging double their, you know, they're just charging way too much, they're gouging. And that might be just a result of, hey, they've got so many leads, because they're that first person that you found in your Google search that they can afford to charge these astronomical rates. But that's not really going to work for you when you're running a business. And so you want to screen at any of the outliers. So that's the first level of screening is just based on pricing. And then once you receive quotes from several paying companies narrowed down the list. And then basically, next is going to be using a clean game selection worksheet sheet to eliminate potential cleaning teams who cannot meet our basic requirements. So you can use this, you can kind of come back to this training and use this or you can, you can craft something similar for yourself. But we want to make sure that the clean team meets our basic requirements, and then also, that they meet as many as possible of the ideal requirements. So if they don't meet the basic requirements, and you'll need to make a list for yourself, or use this and adopt it for yourself, but if they don't meet the basic requirements, then see you later. Adios, right? We don't want anyone that won't meet our minimum standards. And then from the from the idol requirements, we're basically giving people a score so that we can more quantitatively assess who is actually the best cleaning team. And so some of the basic requirements are like, Can the cleaning team integrate directly with booking calendars and self schedule? If not, don't even bother trying to work with them. Because if they can't schedule themselves, that means a whole lot more admin work for you, or wherever you have just needlessly doing that. So you want them to be able to self schedule, it doesn't mean they have to know how to do it already. It just means they have to be willing to it. If you have a clean cleaning team that says no, I need you to give me a schedule, like a month in advance every single time or I need you to tell me every single time I need to go by then adios. Can the clean team ensure a timely and proper cleaning of all properties for which they are responsible? Without exception, right? So can they tell you Yes, I will absolutely get these clean, I understand that your check at checkout time is 11. And your checking time is four, I will get in that five hour window every time and make sure the cleaning gets done. So like our fainting that we work with, they own this 100% No matter what happens, they will figure it out, and they will get it done like rain or shine, I swear we could have a tornado ripping through the neighbourhood and they would be there cleaning like that makes our business managing our properties way, way easier, way less stressful. Because we know that we don't have to even think about that you don't worry about that, if you even have to be thinking about it, that adds a level of stress and a level of distraction that you don't want. So you want to have someone that's really, really good, and really understands integrity and ownership of their work. Cleaning team replenish all consumables. So if they can't do that, like that is just a non negotiable for us. Now, that's not to say they have to go and actually buy that stuff, we actually store it at the property in bulk. We just need them to be able to refill stuff. So if they say no, we don't do that. That's not like in our wheelhouse, we will not refill a soap bottle, and nope, not going to work with them. Because obviously, we're not gonna hire someone different to come in and replenish the soap and the tissue and stuff like that. And ideally, we also want to be able to just send the restocking to them so they can receive it. Because obviously, we don't want to send it to our short term rental property where the guests would then have to receive it. So we want to send like the Amazon shipment or whatever it is to their house and then have them take it to the property and restock our supply cabinet when necessary. But that's only like once every couple of months. So it really shouldn't be a big deal. Can the cleaning team manage all laundry, if they can't manage that, we're going to talk touch about different solutions for laundry as well later on in this training. But if they can't own that process of getting the laundry done, doesn't mean they have to do it themselves in all situations. But if they can't own it, then obviously that's not going to work. And can they invoice on a weekly basis or greater. This is really only a basic requirement. If you've achieved scale, if you've got like 510 properties, if you've got just one property than having them invoice you on every claim is not a really big deal. But if you have like let's say you've got five or 10 properties, and they're invoicing on every single clean, you're going and paying like you know, five different invoices on one day kind of thing that gets me a lot of headache. So ideally, you want to be able to have them invoicing you on a weekly basis or greater.

So I'm giving like one week or longer between invoices, and they just invoice you in bulk for everything. So your ideal cleaning, cleaning team requirements are going to be these ones down below here and you want to basically give them give them a score because some of them are weighted as more important than others. And then just give them a ranking and figure out what their overall score is between you know, one on one and 20 out of this, for example or zero and 20 you might weight things a little bit differently, but I'll just kind of run through these quickly is like Kenneth pleanty and manage multiple properties and the cleaning team continue to grow and clean more properties as we begin to manage more properties or owner properties. Can the cleaning team manage seasonal fluctuations like are they okay being really busy in the summertime and not so busy in the wintertime? Getting a clean team invoice or in semi semi weekly or monthly basis like making that invoicing period greater just makes it a lot less admin work and easier on cash flow. Can the clean team buy and store, store and extra stock of all consumables? If they can store it themselves as well? That can be a bit of a bit of a bonus if you have multiple properties. Can the cleaning team take darvish to the curb side where applicable again, not always a must, you might be able to find someone else's Yeah, like your maintenance person. But if they could do that, that's a bonus as well, can a cleaning team Check, check for visible maintenance issues and communicate directly with the gopher or your maintenance person who for maintenance issues, that's great as well, that not kind of under that category falls foul is doing an inspection that should be like just a non negotiable honestly, is doing the inspection for damages. Now doing a full inventory. I don't honestly recommend like taking an inventory of all the costs, the the forks and knives, it's like it's not that necessary. Because at the end of the day, those are very small, little expenses. If you're worrying about those small little expenses to that degree, then you probably need to buy a better property, the cash flows better, quite frankly. But if you like on a macro level, if they're looking for the big ticket items, obviously make sure the TV is still there, make sure that the Chromecast is still there, make sure the projector is still there, like that's kind of an obvious one. And then every once in a while, you'll want to have them do a more thorough inventory as if things are running low. Like we don't personally like I don't recommend caring about or are charging for like two missing forks or one broken cup. Who cares, it's like a $2 cup, you know, just just like that's an operating expense, from our point of view, but you do want to make sure that the guest doesn't check in, it's like, Oh, we've only got two cups for 10 people like that's obviously not where you want to end up. So make sure they are taking a more macro level maintenance or doing it not necessarily on every clean just to make sure that you have enough supplies there for your guests. Does the cleaning team have their own supplies, brooms, vacuums, Mops, etc. That should be you know, most cleaning teams will have that. It's again, it's not the end of the world if they don't, because you can always just stock that the property, it's not the end of the world. But ideally, they'll just have their own. And again, you can you can, I recommend using a system like this where you give weighted importance to different requirements that you have, so that you can more quantitatively score, you do not want to do this qualitatively based on your emotions, because your emotions will just ultimately have you going with the most charismatic person, the one that you get along with the best, who might lack all the systems to actually succeed. So I do really strongly recommend quantifying it. So then once you've narrowed it down, you should narrow down your list to like ideally, anywhere from like, you don't really want to have one at this stage, you want to have to really at least three to five good candidates meet with meet with each one of them and try them out for a week. So the role is going to be so crucial in your business that's important to hire slowly, and make sure that you you know, kind of look at the different options and find the one that is the best fit. You don't want to go quickly into this and just go okay, like this person got the highest score, let's just hire them forget about the rest, no, like let's take all the ones that could potentially be a great fit, and then try them out and figure out which one is actually the best. Because again, we ideally want to hire this one person one single time and then be done with it and be able to like scale our portfolio and just work with this one cleaning team and not have to worry about it. So yeah, when you're trying out different teams ensure that clean cleaning includes all the services indicated in the property cleaning checklist. So you can see here like it kind of lays out we've got checklists that we go over with our with our clean teams that goes through all the different cleaning that they need to do in order as well and then a final final check as well for like make sure that you know no obvious unclean areas, dishwashers, empty dishes are all put away AC or heater is turned OFF or ON if necessary, stovetop like blah, blah, all that stuff. And then yeah, just basically making sure that all that stuff gets checked off. That's basically the main thing and then get to know each cleaning team and rate them during the initial week from the cleaning team selection worksheet. So again, if you come over here, and like some of this stuff needs to be updated as you start interviewing them, then you'll want to update those and then check on cleaning structure go by and do a check or have someone that you know and trust that you're gofer go by and actually like check on the cleanings at random to ensure quality so you want to make sure that they're actually doing a good job of the cleaning itself like that should be the least important thing honestly because like to get to this stage they should be like absolutely cream of the crop they should be nailing the cleaning. There shouldn't be any issues there really and I don't mean like your particular preferences like sure they might make mistakes on some of the things like they might fold the towels a different way than you would like and to a certain extent you just have to kind of like let go of the of the need for perfection for everything to be just so as as an investor and look at this is more more so it was like okay, as long as they're doing a great job of cleaning and it's and let's like objectively true may not may not subjectively be true based on my subjective desires for like how I want things done, but objectively speaking there There's no dust anywhere, there's no dirt anywhere, the beds are properly made those sorts of things. But yeah, like, if they get to this stage cleaned, you should be doing a great job of that. So make sure that and then, and then ongoing, you just want to basically then have systems to manage them. So one of those is the property cleaning cleaning checklist, I also recommend making a house manual for the cleaning team. So they know the specifics of each property, they've got like pictures of how the property should be staged, where the furniture goes, that kind of thing. And then you also want them to be to be giving make sure they're going into the maintenance tracking spreadsheet, you can use a spreadsheet like this one, or, or you can use, like different software's out there. So like we use hosts way for all our maintenance tracking, we just have like sort of an SOP, a standard operating procedure for how maintenance gets tracked. But just to kind of make sure that they track all the different stuff that needs to get done out of property. And so yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of the basics for for, you know, screening, finding, hiring, training and kind of ongoing management of a great cleaning team. And you can see that the majority of it is really just screening, it's really just finding the right person. Because when you find an A player, you just give them the tools, and they do a great job on like, there's not really a lot of ongoing management. At this stage with our cleaning company. It's like they email me every single time they do a turnover just with with photos of the of the property before and after. And so that we can see everything's up to date, if there is there any supplies that they need, they just let us know, hey, you're running low on XYZ, please order it to our house, great, awesome. Other than that, we just, they invoices, we pay them, it's done. Like, it's fantastic, they do a great job, we don't have to manage them, we don't have to micromanage them by any means. Like they just take care of it. They schedule themselves all that. And so that's what happens when you hire someone that's really really fantastic. By screening out all those bad people at the beginning. So if you guys have any questions about that, that just let me know in the comment section below. And before we do wrap this up. Yeah, I just I just wanted to before we wrap this up, talk about laundry and linens, because that is one thing that I get asked about a lot is, you know, what should I do for for linens? At this property? Like should we have the clean team? Do the laundry at the property? What if it's a larger property and they can't do all the laundry? Should they do it off site on their own? Should we use a linen service, there's a few different options. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. And so I just want to kind of want to run through my my recommendations on that quickly as well before we wrap up this training. And again, if you guys have any other questions specific to cleaning teams, anything that I've covered so far in the train, just let me know in the comment section down below there. Yeah, so as far as linens, the ideal setup is going to be to have your clean team like you can see on our property cleaning checklist here, the number one thing that they're going to do is as soon as they got their strip bedding, load and run the laundry, and then load around the dishwasher. So ideally, your cleaning team is going to do is going to do laundry at the property because they're already there, it means that you're not getting charged twice for the time to do the laundry, because it's just happening in the background. Whereas if you take it to a laundry service, you're paying for the time for them to clean, and there isn't laundry happening in the background. So then you're then paying for laundry and actually tied to your laundry in addition to the the time spent cleaning. So you ideally want to combine those two and have them do laundry at the property. And so in most cases, you shouldn't really run into issues with this, like we have a six bedroom property with one laundry and we've got a normal turnover window. And we managed to get it done like the clean team always manages to get it done. And the way that they do that is by putting it on a quick cycle making sure that as soon as it's done, they load it into the end of the dryer and they're just constantly cycling through. And then we have two sets of bedding that's really important. You have to have two sets of bedding for every single bed so that you're not waiting for the laundry to get out of there to then refresh the beds with new linens. You want to be stripping it putting in the laundry and then go take your other set of linens and and start putting it on the beds there. And then basically what's happening is they're constant doing laundry and if they need to, they can leave the law the last load of laundry in the dryer running a dry cycle and just leave it in the dryer if they need to on a larger property sometimes that's necessary so that's fine do that. Now if for whatever reason your cleaning team is not able to do that. First off, assess why they're not able to do that. Could you get thinner towels and I'm not saying like paper thin towels that like rip when you touch them I'm just saying like do you have thick plush towels that absorb a lot of water, a lot of moisture and that takes like three hours to dry well then Okay, let's move over to some more moderate towels. Same thing with your bedding like making sure that it's not like thick thick bedding that you're that you're putting into the into the wash their deep should you just upgrade your washer dryer like that could be a big thing too. Like just getting a better washer and dryer is likely going to be a worthwhile investment if you're running on sunlight. Like old crappy small or like apartment size system, that's obviously not going to do the trick. So just getting something better, higher capacity back and back and really solve the issue. Now, the other option, if all that fails is you can get a third set of linens. So basically, you're getting three sets of linens for every single bed for all the towels. And then what's happening is they're doing as much laundry as they can, while they're there. And then they're gonna go and and take all of the wash stuff, store it right take off, they've already got a third sets, they've got Okay, all the beds are already made. And they're taking some of the stuff that didn't get that didn't get wash, they're bagging it up. And they're putting it aside for you know, a couple of days from now, once they, once they come back to do the laundry, they're putting that locked in the storage storage area that you have your supplies in or whatnot, and then they're going to start with that stuff next time. So that way you're just kind of like always cycling through, there's always going to be a little bit of laundry yesterday, they might have to spend a bit of extra time like once every couple of weeks to do some additional laundry and kind of get caught up. But that way, you're just going to kind of always again, still be able to have them do it on site as much as possible without running into into any issues there. So that is your your kind of backup option. Now if you absolutely have to, you can have them take it off site and do it themselves off site. Now the pro of that is that you're probably going to get a good rate because they're already you're already a customer, there's you're not paying for like professional, fresher laundry service, which tends to be more expensive. And the other pro is that they can like just manage it a lot easier, because it's just going to be like them doing it. Now the downside of it is that it's going to likely burn them out. If they're busy. If they're actually like working a lot for you and they're getting busy. That's a lot like that, you know, to get back from a day of cleaning properties to then off do like an hour or two of laundry. That's a pain. So I you know, pros and cons really depends. You want to make sure if you are going that route that you've talked to your cleaning team that you're like communicating with them, well, they're voicing any issues if they are starting to get burnt out. Now, the last option would be to have a like a linen service, or using like a linen cleaning service. If you're going to do that have the cleaning team, collect all linens, like make sure you have enough linens that they can go and they can, you know, take it off, strip the bed, make new beds, and then they can take the linens at the end of the day, drop them off to a cleaner and then pick them up the next morning or whatever. Now the challenge with that is it's going to drive up your expenses. So I don't recommend that unless you unless you're just like optimising for convenience over profitability, that can be an option. But if profit profitability is a goal, that's not the best option, because it does tend to be more expensive. So that those are my thoughts on laundry. Hopefully that helps. I haven't seen any other questions coming in in the comment section here. So yeah, if you guys do have any other questions about this, feel free if you're watching the recording of this as well just drop your questions in the comments and we'll get them answered. And we're going to drop you guys this this property cleaning checklist as well. So if you guys want it, just comment down below that you want a copy of this, this checklist so that we can share that with you as well. Hopefully you've enjoyed this training and we will we'll see you in the next one. So everyone have an awesome rest your week and we'll talk again soon