Tenants Turn Over, sheet cleaning

[Candyce Chen]

Hi BP community,

I host mid-term rentals and self-manage my long-distant properties remotely. One of the biggest challenges I face is the short window of time between tenant turnovers, which makes it difficult to handle laundry efficiently—especially with high-end linens and towels in a 3-bedroom, 2-bath unit. Most of our guests stay between 5 to 9 months. Unlike short term rental properties that can clean sheets/towels every few days, our mid-term rental properties are not able to do that.

We’ve run into a few issues:

• Storage limitations: We can't leave fresh linens, towels, or bedding in the owner’s closet, as they risk getting musty after 6–9 months and would need to be washed again before use.

• Laundry bottlenecks: Our cleaning team currently spends 8–10 hours laundering all the linens—sheets, duvets, pillowcases, mattress protectors, bath/kitchen/hand/face towels—between guests. We use a standard residential washer/dryer, which isn't fast or efficient for large loads.

• No reliable outsourcing: Local dry cleaners usually take 3–5 days to return items, even if we drop them off right after checkout—which doesn’t work for tight turnarounds. Our cleaning crew also charges us per hour, so it can not be more than one hour drive from the house.

• Inventory strategy: We've increased our linen and towel inventory and purchased new sets to use at turnover. However, even these new items require washing before use, so we’re still spending 8–10 hours on laundry per turn.

We start to have cleaning service every two months, but it still takes more than one days for our cleaning crew to wash sheets/towels. We also consider to mail brand new sheets to our cleaning crews. 

Do anyone have any tips or strategies for managing linens and towels cleaning/inventory more efficiently, especially to enable quicker turnovers for mid-term rentals?

Thanks.

Candyce

[Lauren Kormylo]

Can you hire someone to take all the laundry to a laundromat and use 6 washers at the same time, and then 6 dryers? That way all of it will be done in much less time. They’ll have to be there for it, but it should be done in 2 hours.