Hiring a Cleaner

Your cleaner is more important than your realtor, your lender and your pricing tool put together.

That sounds like a line. It is arithmetic. Your realtor touches this property twice. Your cleaner touches it sixty-four times a year, and every single review a guest writes is really a review of their work.

What the job actually is

Strip and remake every bed. Full bathroom clean. Kitchen including the inside of the microwave and the fridge. Floors. Pool deck and furniture. Trash out, bins to the kerb if it is collection day. Restock every consumable. Reset the house to match its photographs. Check for damage. Photograph everything.

On a 3-bedroom pool home that is three to four and a half hours of real work. It is not “a clean.” It is a reset of a small hotel room that eight strangers just lived in.

What to pay

What to demand

This is your only eyes on the property and the only evidence that ever wins a damage claim. Make it non-negotiable, make it part of the rate, and make it the condition of getting paid.

Every clean, without exception:

• Timestamped photos of every bedroom, every bathroom, the kitchen, the living area, the pool deck and the grill.
• A damage yes/no. Not “I’ll mention it if it matters” — an explicit yes or no, every time.
• A restock list of anything now under one turn’s supply.
• A confirmation text the moment a same-day turn is finished.

The reason for photos on clean turns — not just bad ones — is that a claim is won by proving the damage is new. Without a clean photo from the turn before, you cannot show which guest did it, and the platform will not guess in your favour.

Got it? One last thing, and it is the part owners skip.

Verify the first three

Walk the property yourself after their first clean. Then after the second. Then spot-check the third from the photos. You are not being difficult; you are calibrating what their “done” looks like against what your guests will see.

Check the things guests check and cleaners rush: under the beds, the inside of the microwave, the shower door track, the bottom of the kettle, the sliding-door track to the lanai, and whether the throw pillows are back the way the photos show them.

Also defined: Cleaning Fee