Cleaning Services 1. How much do you charge?We charge per unit. It typically depends on the size of the unit based on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. However because condos and houses vary so wildly we are unable to give a price list without seeing them first. We are familiar with many of the high rise buildings from the far East End of the beach to the far West End stopping at 30A and can generally ballpark a figure over the phone.2. What is included in your rates?We have a standard cleaning checklist which is provided to all cleaners, every time that they clean and can be provided to any owner interested in our services. A very broad generality is to say that linens are changed, bathrooms are cleaned and disinfected, surfaces dusted, ceiling fans, patios, glass doors, all appliances, etc. There is much more detail than that and we will happily send an entire checklist to anyone interested. As a caveat to that. Because of the nature of the vacation rental business, we have a whole lot of people from all areas of the country and world in and out of our units. With the recent development of COVID-19 we’ve been mandated by law to change quite a few things in our “standard” cleaning procedure. We buy one of the most powerful, industrial grade disinfectants on the market, it’s even rated to kill HIV. We also pay very close attention to things which people touch often (think light switches, door handles, pull-strings on fans, faucet knobs, etc..) in order to ensure a germ-free environment for your next guests to walk into. There is an extra, non-optional charge for that because of the incredibly high cost of the disinfectant and the extra work our cleaners must put into such detail. This is required by law until further notice.3. Who cleans my units?We have one of the larger companies on the beach with a seasonal staff of quite a few people. We always do background checks of our employees and in over a decade of business have yet to have any improprieties of our employees. However, we often get asked “will the same person be cleaning my unit each time?” and the answer is very likely not. It depends on our schedule overall and which employees are scheduled to work that day which determines which cleaners clean which units. With that being said, we have a core group of inspectors who go behind our cleaners after every single clean. They inspect the work of the cleaners, but their responsibilities also include reporting any maintenance damage they see. If there is an emergency, for instance there is something leaking or an A/C unit is out, an owner will get a phone call immediately. For more minor maintenance problems like burnt out light bulbs or stains on furniture, our inspectors will take pictures and send them into our office, who will then notify the owners via e-mail. Those inspectors will very often have the same areas of the beach which they inspect and they become very familiar with the units that they inspect. We cannot possibly guarantee that we will notice if small things like a remote is missing or a piece of dishware or cutlery is no longer there. However, the more familiar we get with our units, the more we notice.4. How do you handle linens?When we begin working with an owner we ask for two full sets of standard, hospitality style white linens, one set to be in the unit being used by the guest, the other to be being laundered. We standardize the linens that we put into the units because all of our dirty laundry is taken out of the unit and sent to an off-site laundering facility where they are washed, sanitized, folded, and brought back to our storage facility for their next use. All linens go into a “linen pool.” If you’ve been in this business for any amount of time then you know that linens get damaged, go missing, get stained, etc. throughout the rental season. We charge an annual linen pool fee of $275 dollars to cover replacement of all of those occurrences. We do this for a very specific reason, time. Our cleaners do not have time to do a full inventory and usability check of every sheet, towel, washcloth, pillowcase, etc. when they clean. They bring a full clean set in with them and remove whatever dirty linens are in the unit. This also avoids us having to nickel-and-dime our owners calling every week asking for a few dollars here or a lot of dollars there for missing or damaged linens. So by doing it as a linen pool, we guarantee that at any point in time you as an owner still own two full sets of linens for your unit and should we part ways like when a unit sells, or if you decide to stop renting the unit, we return two full sets of linens to you rather than just whatever has gone missing or been damaged during our tenure with you.5. Guest dissatisfaction terms?We obviously take every precaution to ensure that this doesn’t happen, however cleaners and inspectors are still human beings and can make mistakes sometimes. We have a 24 hour emergency on-call line. An emergency would constitute say, if a guest checks in at 11pm and they are missing linens for the sleeper sofa, we will bring them out to them so that they can sleep. What we do not consider an emergency is something like there is a spill on a cabinet or a smudge on a mirror. For something like that, we will happily send someone out the next morning to rectify the problem.6. What amenities do you provide?We provide what we like to call a “starter pack” of amenities. In bathrooms we provide a roll of toilet paper, bathing soap, face soap, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, and of course a couple of trash bags to get the guests started so that they don’t have to go to the store immediately if they want to shower and use the bathroom when they arrive. We do not provide amenities for the entire stay of a guest or replenish them like hotels do, it is up to the guest to provide whatever extra that they will need for their stay. In the kitchens we will provide a roll of paper towels, liquid dish soap, a couple of trash bags, and a couple of individual packages of dishwashing powder again, so that they guests have the basic necessities when they check in.7. Check-in/Check-out.We ask all of our owners to adhere to the industry standard of a 10am check-out and 4pm check-in. This gives our cleaners ample time to clean a unit properly and our inspectors time to be able to check behind them. However, it does happen that some guests request to get into a unit early or leave late. We can never guarantee that as we must ensure quality, but if an owner gives us notice we will do our best to accommodate within reason as long as it’s an occasional request. We always ask of our owners the same thing, “please do not tell your guests they can leave late or check in early, but we will try.” Leaving late. It happens sometimes that guests don’t leave in a timely manner, if this happens we charge a $25/half-hour “wait fee” as our cleaners do not get paid by the hour but by the units that they clean, if they are unable to get started on time we have to decrease their workload, which means that they get paid less and that makes it more difficult for us to retain quality employees.8. SchedulingTypically our owners will send in reservations by email. We always ask that reservations are sent in a “arrival/departure” format for the month and with any new reservations or cancellations being highlighted to draw our attention to it in order to ensure nothing gets missed. We are well aware that this is a fast-paced business where changes happen daily but we like to have as much advance notice as we can. We are a large enough company though that on an owner’s end, if there is a last minute cancellation or cleaning necessary, as long as we know the day before we can almost certainly guarantee that it will be taken care of. We have an entire staff, which works to your advantage because instead of having just one local cleaner who might get sick, have a family emergency, or for whatever reason be unavailable for your unit, we can simply reassign a different cleaner to cover a unit if one of our staff calls in sick or is unable to make it to work that day.9. PaymentWe bill owners weekly, typically on Sundays, through a third party such as Quickbooks or Square. Our invoice is sent via e-mail with a link to a secure site where an owner can pay using a credit/debit card, e-check, or various other payment methods. We do not at any point in time have access to any of our owners’ payment information. Invoices are due on receipt.10. Deep CleansWe very strongly encourage our owners to do a “deep clean” at least once a year. We can provide a detailed checklist, but the abridged version is that everything in the unit gets cleaned, top to bottom. Furniture gets moved, appliances are taken out and cleaned on top of and behind, light bulbs and globes are removed and dusted. For instance, bugs tend to accumulate in the globes of ceiling fans, those are taken down and cleaned out and replaced. We can go on, but the short version is that everything gets taken apart and cleaned and put back together. We consider this absolutely necessary with the high amount of foot traffic that goes on when using a unit as a vacation rental. The cost of a deep clean is 2x the amount of a regular clean because it is a completely different set of services performed. Some owners do them bi-annually and we are perfectly fine with that. A deep clean is not mandatory, but we do absolutely encourage this to happen at least once a year during the off-season.11. Touch-Ups & Trip feesWhen a unit sits empty for a while, dust settles, mold grows in toilets, and they begin to get a “stale” feeling. If your unit has been sitting empty we provide a touch-up service where we go into your unit and freshen it up before the next guest arrives so that they walk into it feeling that it has just been cleaned. There is a $25 dollar charge for this service, but well worth it when the alternative is an unhappy guest who thinks that they’re walking into a dusty and moldy attic of a unit. On other occasions, owners will ask us to do odd things like pick up some extra utensils or grab a shower curtain or something. As most of our owners aren’t local to the area and we are, we try to accommodate such requests as best we can. Sometimes owners will buy new comforters or a new coffee pot or something and have them shipped to us to put in the unit. When it’s something small like that we will charge a $25 trip fee (plus the cost of the item if we have to purchase it obviously.) We try to help our out-of-town owners in any way that we can. This sort of overlaps with our property management consultations and can be handled on a case-by-case basis. Contact Us
