Guide to Getting Your Rental Home Clean & Ready

Whether you’re getting a beach house ready for summer or a cabin ready for fall, you’ll need to make sure your rental home is clean and welcoming for your potential renters. It’s almost time to start planning and prepping for new bookings, but where do you start with cleaning? We’ve put together a guide full of helpful tips and suggestions you can use when you’re getting your rental home ready for any season.

Put Yourself in The Guests’ Shoes

When it comes down to figuring out where to start when getting your rental home ready, try imagining yourself as a guest in the home. What would you like or not like about what you see? Is there something you would notice or question about the cleanliness of the space? What amenities would you want as a guest? Think about what might be missing or unnecessary in the space as a guest. Walk around the house and start making a list of changes to make or areas to focus on when cleaning. You can use this list you make to put together a checklist for cleaning the rental house later. You make this checklist as simple or precise as you like but remember if you were the guest, how would you see your rental?

Start the Cleaning Process

Now that you have your checklist, you can divide the cleaning tasks by room. While we highly recommend having friends or family with you to help speed through the cleaning or you may want to consider hiring a cleaning service depending on the size of the house. Of course, we understand that this isn’t always possible, so it’s a good idea to keep the cleaning process as simple as possible as you may only have a few hours between guest check-out and check-in. The best practice when you need to get the cleaning done quickly is working from top to bottom inside and then working your way outside. Before you start make sure you have all the cleaning supplies you need with you, we suggest including:

• A broom and mop, or a Swiffer that can handle both wet and dry cleaning
• A vacuum
• Spare trash bags
• Rubber gloves (for any extra messy spaces)
• Dusting tools
• Microfiber cloths or rags and sponges
• Multi-surface disinfecting wipes
• Glass cleaner
• Toilet and shower cleaner

You can start the process by taking on the tasks that will take the longest, like washing bedding and towels and running the dishwasher. While those are running their cycles, you can take on the rest of your checklist one room at a time.

How to Streamline Cleaning

As we said, the cleaning process can be a lot, especially when you do it on your own. In order to further simplify the seasonal upkeep of your rental property, here are a few tips:

• If you don’t use the home all year and only rent the property seasonally, it can be a good idea to cover furniture and roll up rugs and mats to prevent dust and sun-bleaching near windows.
• Along those same lines, you can keep outdoor furniture covered or stored away in a shed or under a porch when the property is not being used.
• When running through the last cleaning of the season, be sure to remove any and all food from the property in order to avoid any pests. You could also consider scheduling a pest control service to spray around the home at the end and beginning of each rental season.
• During the rental season, some properties create minimal check-out cleaning lists for guests such as putting all the towels in one place, stripping all the beds, and putting all the trash into one bin. You may not want to ask guests for this, but it could help you speed through cleaning between rentals.
• Some owners can include security deposits or cleaning fees in the rental price. This can help if you have multiple properties and choose to hire a service to clean your properties between guests. These fees are also a good idea as protection for you and your property should it be damaged by a guest.

Need Some help?

It can be pretty overwhelming to clean and manage multiple properties during peak rental seasons. If you’ve been struggling to do the cleaning yourself or maybe if you’re ready to look into renting out a second or third property, allow yourself a break from the stress of doing it all. Consider hiring a friendly and professional service to take over the cleaning, we’re certainly happy to help! Contact us for any of your Philadelphia deep cleaning needs, we have several different services that you may be interested in, including rental property and Airbnb cleaning.