Linen, consumables, damage reporting and a reset to a photograph. The cleaning is maybe half the job and it’s the half that goes wrong least often.
A domestic clean makes a home better than it was. A turnover makes a property identical to what it was on a specific date, when somebody photographed it, and then tells the owner what’s broken. Those are different disciplines and hiring for one when you need the other is why hosts churn through cleaners.
I do six of these a week across three properties. It took me about four months to stop cleaning them like flats.
What is a turnover cleaner actually being asked to produce?
The listing photographs, again, on a deadline.
That’s the whole brief and it’s worth stating baldly, because it reorganises every priority. A domestic client wants the kitchen degreased and doesn’t care whether the cushions are at forty-five degrees. A guest who booked a flat from fourteen images arrives expecting those fourteen images, and the gap between what they saw and what they walk into is the entire mechanism by which a review goes from five stars to three.
So staging isn’t decoration in this work. It’s the deliverable. Cushions squared, throw folded the way it’s folded in the photo, dining chairs pushed in, bedside lamps angled, remote controls parallel, the fruit bowl or whatever prop lives on the island back in position. Any good turnover operation runs from a photo pack – one image per room shot in the finished state, held on the cleaner’s phone, and checked against before leaving.
The cleaning underneath it is a good domestic standard, not a deep clean. Nobody is degreasing an extractor hood on a Saturday with a three-hour window.
The photo pack, and why it beats a checklist
Written checklists fail on this work because they describe actions and the guest experiences a state.
“Make bed” is a line on a checklist. It doesn’t say which way the duvet fold faces or that the third pillow is decorative. I’ve walked into a flat in Bethnal Green where three different cleaners over a month had made the same bed three different ways, and the host couldn’t work out why one guest mentioned it.
One photograph per room, updated whenever anything changes, and the instruction is match this. It also protects the cleaner – if the host complains, the photo is the standard both people agreed to.
What does a domestic clean simply never include?
Four things, and each of them carries its own failure mode.
Linen is the big one. Every bed stripped and remade with a fresh set, every towel out, bath mats, tea towels, oven gloves, and in a proper operation the mattress protector and pillow protectors checked underneath rather than assumed. That means a par level – three sets per bed minimum, so one’s on, one’s clean, one’s in the wash – and either an in-house laundry cycle or a hire contract. Hosts who run two sets discover the problem on the first same-day turnover with a delayed collection.
Consumables second. Loo roll, hand soap, washing-up liquid, dishwasher tabs, bin liners, kitchen roll, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, sponges, shower gel if the listing promises it. Somebody has to count these, carry stock, and replace them, and that person is the cleaner because nobody else is in the building.
Third: damage and inventory reporting, which I’ll come to.
Fourth, and least discussed – the cleaner is the property’s only regular inspection. Boiler pressure, a slow-draining shower, a smoke alarm chirping, a window handle that’s gone stiff, damp appearing behind a wardrobe. In a domestic clean none of that is your business. Here it’s the whole reason the owner sleeps.
The dishwasher and the cupboard audit
Guests put things away wrong, and a turnover has to correct it.
Pans in the wrong cupboard, a chef’s knife in the dishwasher going blunt, the good glasses on the bottom shelf, four mugs unaccounted for because they’re in the bedroom. Cutlery drawer counted, glassware counted, the crockery back at the number the inventory says. It takes ten minutes and it’s the difference between a kitchen that stays functional for two years and one that’s a jumble of survivors by August.
Check the dishwasher and the washing machine are empty. Someone has left a load in one of them, wet, and it will smell by Thursday.
How does the time pressure change what gets done?
Checkout at ten, check-in at three, and a good chunk of that gone to travel. On the day it’s frequently checkout at eleven and check-in at two, which is three hours for a two-bed including laundry handling.
You don’t deep clean in that window and pretending otherwise produces a flat that’s superficially staged and structurally filthy. What actually works is a two-tier system: the turnover covers a fixed scope every single time, and a scheduled deep clean covers the rest on a cycle – monthly or every six to eight turnovers, whichever comes first, booked into a deliberate blank day between bookings.
The deep list: oven, hood filters, fridge shelves out, descale kettle and shower head, grout, behind the appliances, mattress protectors laundered, windows, skirtings, wardrobe interiors, under the beds.
Hosts resist the blank day because it’s revenue foregone. They lose more to a review mentioning a dirty oven, and they lose it for months, because that review sits there while the price you can charge quietly drops.
Two people, not one
For anything above a studio, send two cleaners. It halves the elapsed time rather than the work, which is the only variable that matters when there’s a guest arriving at two.
One does beds and bathrooms, one does kitchen and living space, then both do floors and the staging pass together. In a one-bed in Shoreditch that’s ninety minutes with two and two and a half hours with one, and the second scenario is the one where the arriving guest is standing in the corridor with a suitcase.
Who reports damage, and what happens if nobody does?
The cleaner reports it, within twenty-four hours of the guest leaving, with photographs. If that doesn’t happen, the loss belongs to the owner permanently.
This is the part hosts underinvest in and it’s worth more than the cleaning. Airbnb’s damage protection under AirCover requires a claim raised within a defined window and before the next guest checks in – once somebody else has slept in the flat, you cannot attribute a stain to the previous party and the claim dies. Same logic as any insurance loss. The evidence has a shelf life measured in hours.
So the turnover protocol is: photograph before touching anything. Walk the flat, video if it’s bad, wide shot per room, close-ups of anything damaged or stained, then start work. Report through whatever channel the host uses – a WhatsApp thread is fine, an app is better – and note the small things too, because a chipped worktop that appeared in June and gets recorded in June is a different conversation from one discovered in November.
I photograph the bin contents in a shot when a party looks likely. Twice that’s mattered.
What I refuse to do without being asked twice
I won’t wash a stain out of a mattress protector or a sofa cushion before it’s been reported. That’s the same instinct that destroys insurance claims – the urge to make the problem disappear because making problems disappear is what cleaners do.
Same with a broken glass or a burnt pan. Photograph, report, then clear. It costs four minutes.
The one that comes up most is smoking. A non-smoking listing where somebody has smoked out of the bedroom window leaves a smell in the curtain and a burn on the sill, and the flat needs a treatment rather than a wipe. Report it the same morning or the host is eating a curtain replacement.
Should you hire a domestic cleaner and train them, or a turnover company?
Whichever you choose, budget properly, and this is where I’ll be unpopular with the hosts reading.
Turnover work is harder than domestic cleaning and most listings price it as though it’s easier. It carries a hard deadline, an inspection duty, physical laundry logistics, stock management and reputational consequence, and the going rate in London is often set by what the host thinks a guest will tolerate as a cleaning fee rather than by what the work costs. Then the cleaner cuts corners, the host churns to a cheaper one, and the flat degrades a bit with each rotation.
Pay above domestic rate, not below. A cleaner who knows the property, has a key, knows where the spare linen is and notices the boiler pressure dropping is worth two of anyone you can book at short notice on a platform.
Independent cleaner suits a host with one or two properties in one area, and you’ll build the photo pack and the stock list yourself over a couple of months. A turnover company suits three-plus properties or anyone not in the city, and you pay a margin for cover when somebody’s ill – which is the actual product you’re buying, because the failure that ruins a month is the one nobody could attend.
The keys and the access thing
Whoever it is, they need independent access and a way to raise the alarm. Lockbox or smart lock, code changed periodically, and a backup contact who can get there in forty minutes.
I’ve stood outside a flat in Deptford at eleven-fifteen with a guest arriving at two and the host asleep in another time zone, because the previous guest took the key with them to Gatwick. Nothing in that scenario is a cleaning problem, and all of it lands on the cleaner.
Leave the heating on low in winter and the extractor running for twenty minutes after you’ve done the bathroom. Arriving to a cold flat that smells of bleach reads as a cheap flat.
