Thankfully, hosts can set their own timeframe for cleaning their homes in between guests. Most people allow themselves around 4 hours, which is a perfect amount of time to thoroughly clean the entire unit with special attention to guest “pain spots.” These are the highly frequented areas guests are most likely to notice spots or dirt, such as the linens, towels, floors, and bathroom.
It’s best for a host to begin their cleaning with a load of laundry––ideally, with the linens and towels washed separately. We recommend starting with laundry because the cycles can run in the background while you start other areas of the house. If you wait to start laundry until the end of the cleaning, you and your staff will be sitting around waiting for laundry cycles to finish. This alone will save you one hour––with 30 minutes of the wash cycle and 30 minutes of the dry cycle happening while you are cleaning other parts of the house.
Other tips for speeding up include:
- Using a lint roller to collect hair (pets and otherwise): No one likes to see someone else’s hair in their space. Using a lint roller is the easiest way to collect strands from sheets and cracks in the floor. Save time by using a quickly lint roller instead of a full clean.
- Don’t be a knick-knack collector: While adding small sentimental touches to your home can make a guest feel more at ease, if your house is filled to the brim with tiny souvenirs and the like, dust can easily collect on these objects. By keeping things clean and orderly, your home will appear cleaner and more modern. Save time cleaning by simply not storing all of ‘the extras’ on your rental shelves.
- Don’t be afraid to hire a laundry service: If you know you won’t be able to clean or finish the laundry in a concise amount of time, don’t be afraid to hire a third-party laundry service to take care of the laundry for you. You can always add a cleaning fee to your guest’s charges to offset the expenditure. And, a close relationship with a commercial laundry service provider will help to manage inventory and to prevent damage.
- Make sure your house smells nice: A guest will always notice how your home smells when they first enter. Don’t use chemical products for fake freshness. Instead, use essential oils in a diffuser, or, if you don’t have a diffuser, place two or three drops of your preferred oil onto a tissue and tuck it into your window’s blinds. This will keep the tissue out of sight and diffuse the scent throughout the room.
