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It's not much of a secret that one of the best ways to achieve success with your Navarre Beach rental is by keeping it clean and in good condition.
The secret, however, is how to do so. Cleaning and maintaining your Navarre Beach vacation rental is more complex than it may sound at first. At Navarre Beach Rental, we see cleaning and maintenance of our beach properties as an ongoing task that demands a lot of expertise.
If your vacation beach rental is doing well, that means it will receive a lot of guests, and turnover will be high. This is great, but it also means you'll need to put a lot of effort into cleaning the space after each guest leaves and before the next arrives.
To make this task even more complicated, it happens more often than not that the window of opportunity for cleaning is short. The interval between one guest and another is often brief — and this is all the time you have in your hands to keep your place flawless.
Because of all of the above, cleaning our beach rental is a whole other ball game when compared to cleaning your own home.
We could say that it is an operation more akin to hotel upkeep. Well, yes and no. There are indeed some similarities but there are also major differences. One of them is that vacation rentals usually have different amenities and spaces from a hotel room, like kitchens, dining rooms, and outdoor areas featuring pools or hot tubs. And each of those requires some specific cleaning routine. We are no longer speaking only of a bed and a bathroom.
As professional vacation property managers in Navarre Beach, FL, we have developed a good understanding and a set of best practices to keep our vacation rentals clean for all guests and well-maintained at all times.
We like to see those as our secrets for success — but today you're in luck because we will share them all with you.
In this blog, you'll find 10 of our insider tips for Navarre Beach rental cleaning and maintenance.
Roll up your sleeves, and let's get started.
Your property should look clean and well-maintained in your pictures, but it's very important that guests find it the same way when they check-in. Pictured: Dream Maker.
If we say that you need to keep your rental spotlessly clean for every new guest, some owners will think they need to perform a heavy cleaning session every time someone checks out. That's really not the case.
Heavy cleaning is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, and it would be incredibly impractical to have one performed every time someone leaves your rental property.
The key to going about this is performing a lighter cleaning session between guests and saving the heavy work for one or two times a year.
Wondering what the difference is exactly?
Routine cleaning is a lighter type of cleaning that should be performed every time a guest checks out of your property. The aim is to leave the place in order for the next guest, and it must look exactly as it does in the online listing photographs.
Routine cleaning covers all the main touchpoints in a vacation rental and is still a lot more budget-friendly. Tasks include vacuuming, replacing bed linens and towels, mopping, dusting, cleaning surfaces, and disinfecting the bathroom and the kitchen, among others.
One of the main points of routine cleaning is hair removal. No one likes to find other people's hair when they arrive in a new bathroom or bedroom. Still, it happens a lot more than you may think in this industry. That's why we always instruct our cleaners to keep an eye out not just for other people's hair but also their own. We also arm them with sticky rollers — an essential ally in the cleaning battle!
During routine cleaning is also the time to perform some inventory checks and check if there's anything missing or broken.
Deep cleaning is when the heavy workload gets done, and because of that, it's a much more effortful, time-consuming, and expensive process. With deep cleans, you need to block a day in your calendar, which we suggest doing during the slow season.
Here are some of the tasks: treating the wood on the floors and elsewhere, clearing the air with purification systems, sanitizing mattresses, steam cleaning carpets, cleaning air vents, lifting and cleaning behind every major appliance and furniture piece, and so on.
At Navarre Beach Properties, we help owners in scheduling annual deep cleans. They sure demand a lot of attention and time, but deep cleans are what will keep your rental in excellent condition and away from bigger and more complex issues.
At Navarre Beach Properties, we also view deep cleaning as a form of preventive maintenance that helps prevent major problems from arising. Pictured: Paradise Upper.
Speaking of deep cleaning, at Navarre Beach Properties, we like to see this process as a form of preventative maintenance. Regardless of the type of property you own, adopting preventive maintenance will guarantee it stays in its best condition, and it will also spare you from major and unexpected headaches.
Taking the preventive maintenance route means performing regular inspections and repairs to tackle minor issues before they become big and costly problems. Once again, deep cleans are great times to do this. But you should also instruct your cleaning crew to keep an eye out for anything that might pop up during their routine cleaning.
Keep in mind that preventive maintenance is not only about keeping your rental in good shape and free from major problems; it's also about ensuring your guests are staying in a secure space.
Given the high demand for several rentals in our portfolio at Navarre, we engage third-party expert cleaners, and we always work with the best of the best. The results show in the reviews for our properties when guests mention the high levels of cleanliness.
Some owners, especially if they are still starting and don't have many properties in their portfolio, might be tempted to perform the cleaning tasks themselves.
We understand and insist that cleaning is a precise task that requires an experienced professional. Cleaning professionals have developed the right skills to ensure vacation rentals look perfect at all times.
That's why our approach is to avoid going in-house and trust their work. However, we do rely on a team of in-house inspectors, who are employees of our firm. With the responsibility of making sure everything is up to our superior standards, they also handle tasks such as changing air filters, batteries, and bulbs within the service... and the best part? It's all done at no cost to our owners.
That's why our approach is to avoid going in-house and trust their work. However, we do rely on a team of in-house inspectors, who are employees of our firm. With the responsibility of making sure everything is up to our superior standards, they also handle tasks such as changing air filters, batteries, and bulbs within the service... and the best part? It's all done at no cost to our owners.
4. Create a feedback system.
As with various aspects of business and life, feedback is important in any type of collaborative effort. A structured approach to encourage open communication helps individuals identify what they are doing well and what they are doing wrong and it makes them improve.
Therefore, creating a feedback system that involves everyone in the cleaning and maintenance process, from cleaning staff to inspectors, is a great idea that will lead to even better results. Feedback is also one of the best ways to promote team spirit, motivation, and self-improvement.
It is important to know, though, that for a feedback system to work well, all parties need to be actively involved, which means you should listen to your cleaning team and understand their hurdles.
Also, keep in mind that your cleaners are experts in their field, and you should trust their expertise. If they ever express genuine concerns, listen to what they have to say and consider their insights.
Pro tip: holding regular meetings with your cleaning team and inspectors to discuss how things are going is a good practice to create a feedback routine.
Besides providing constructive feedback, another way you can help your cleaning staff is by offering simple instructions that specify your expectations for cleaning your Navarre Beach rental. Such instructions should include, among other things, critical aspects of the property that demand a more meticulous approach.
For instance, you can craft checklists that determine the order of tasks and include cleaning procedures and steps. You can even go a step further and create two distinct lists: one for major and more complex tasks, and another for smaller tasks that often go overlooked.
Regarding the latter, with years of experience, we learned that things like cleaning inside fridges and microwaves, and unclogging shower drains can sometimes be overlooked — and when that happens, you can be sure there's a bad review coming your way.
Pro tip: to make guidelines even more efficient, you can create them in an online form and include photos or links to videos. Nowadays, cleaning staff usually perform their duties with their smartphones in their pockets.
Every guest appreciates finding clean and high-quality linens when they check into a new place, and this often translates into positive reviews. At Navarre Beach Properties, we understand this well, and that's why we ensure that all our linens are not only professionally washed but also bleached at service centers.
We follow the rule of providing at least one bath towel, two washcloths, and a hand towel per guest, and we also keep some extra supplies in the closet so guests have spares if needed.
When changing and cleaning linens and towels, we always instruct our cleaning staff to be on the lookout for stains. While stains may not damage the material, they can affect the overall appearance, so they need to be addressed for that pristine look we always aim for.
As property managers in Navarre Beach, we have all our linens laundered and bleached at professional service centers. Pictured: Makarios Beach Blu.
Did you know there is a way to involve your guests in helping your cleaning staff with their daily tasks?
We have tried it before: if you leave cleaning supplies at hand during guests' stays, they are more likely to use them and clean up after themselves. Sponges, dish soap, detergents, and additional trash bins are a good start.
When guests see cleaning items, they feel more encouraged to keep things clean and dispose of garbage before they leave. In general, these items represent only a small investment, but one that your cleaning crew will surely appreciate.
Want an even more direct route to helping your staff? Then feel free to create cleaning guidelines for guests to perform before checking out. For example, you can ask guests to leave the fridge free of food and wash the dishes before they go. This is not asking too much!
As mentioned above, short-term rentals require much more cleaning than a regular home and even more than a hotel. For this reason, having a well-stocked inventory of cleaning supplies is essential to ensure you never run out when you need them. But since you need so much, this means the costs of buying them will also be much higher.
A smart way to go about it is to buy your cleaning supplies in bulk from wholesalers. This way, you can get them at discounted rates and save a lot of money. You will also save much of your time, especially if you get them online. Online platforms will save your order information, which means you can simply replicate the same order in the future or add more or fewer quantities of the same items.
A well-supplied inventory of cleaning products means you can quickly react to any cleaning requirement that may arise during a guest's stay. Being fast at resolving issues directly leads to happier guests and better reviews.
You can also employ the use of tech tools to help streamline and enhance your short-term rental cleaning process. Property Management Systems (PMS) offer interfaces that enable you to see and confirm schedules, manage tasks, and set notifications for important maintenance tasks.
These options are incredibly versatile nowadays. You can choose to establish time intervals or set alerts within specific time frames or even according to the number of guest stays.
Here are some of the best platforms out there:
Tech can also be helpful when your crew is hands on in your vacation rental. Using apps like Solocator, cleaners can take photographs of any problems they come across. This is certainly useful evidence if the need for damage claims arises.
Having your cleaning and maintenance procedures in place and ensuring top quality can indeed be a demanding task. Still, there's help out there — and we are not talking about the cleaning crew this time (although they are pretty essential, as we already discussed).
Besides their help, you can also hire professional property managers like ourselves to take the weight off your shoulders and oversee the whole endeavor. Among other things, professional managers can assist with efficient scheduling, quality control, crew and vendor management, the feedback loop with the team, guest communication, tech integration, and problem resolution.
At Navarre Beach Properties, we take pride in maintaining very high standards regarding cleaning and maintenance. This commitment helps create the best guest experience, higher rental rates, and more repeat guests.
We hope you find these tips for cleaning and maintenance useful. But don't stop your learning journey there. For other property management insights, keep an eye on our website for upcoming blogs.
