Laundry Trouble? Efficient Options for your Short Term Rental

Arguably, one of the biggest pieces of our housekeeping turnover with our short term rentals is laundry. And it can be a bottleneck, it can be a pain in the butt. There are several ways, luckily, to handle this. So I want to talk this week about efficient laundry options for your short term rental. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals, quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. One of the biggest challenges with our housekeeping is our laundry. Now, of course, like everything, the more properties we have in our short term rental portfolio, the more these little challenges become big challenges. And if you're building a portfolio, if you have several properties already, well, you've probably discovered that your laundry operations can be a bit of a bottlene. So we're going to talk about three ways that we can efficiently be doing laundry and the ways where most people are doing their laundry right now. Some of the challenges and some of the benefits which with each of those options. So the first one is just doing laundry in your property. And now this might have been the only thing that you thought of. If you have a vacation rental and your housekeeper shows up and it takes them about two to three hours to clean the property, well, they can easily throw the laundry in the wash machine and when they're done cleaning, all of their linens hopefully are nice and clean. But what if that property happens to have four bedrooms? They can't possibly fit all of that linen in one load. So that creates some issues. And what might happen is that your housekeeper tries to put too much laundry in one load, which causes a bit of damage and definitely causes more wear and wear and tear on your machines. They're not built for washing giant loads of laundry day in and day out. So that's one thing that can happen. The other thing that could happen is that your housekeeping expenses go up a lot because you have housekeepers waiting there for the laundry to be finished. Maybe they've cleaned the whole house already, but the laundry is not dry yet. And that's usually what takes the most time with residential machine is the drying. We're going to get to some of the other options here too. One of the things I find interesting is that commercial machines, a lot of laundromats, for example, they let you dry your linens for free because those machines do such a good job. So we're going to get to commercial options here in a Quick second. So if you have a large home that needs multiple loads of laundry, then it's going to be really difficult for your housekeeper to get all those done in a timely manner, especially if you have have other guests checking in. So what can you do? Well, pretty easy. You just buy extra sets of linen, right? Your housekeeper shows up, they put all the new linens on the property, and then you don't have that rush going on. If there's not another guest checking in, then they can still get the laundry done and leave the fresh ones there. But sometimes we have to go off site to finish our laundry, and that can be a really good option for both you. No other trips to a laundromat or anything required. But if your short term rental or your short term rentals just have too much laundry, then we have to look at other options. And so that brings me to our second option, which is doing our laundry off site. If you missed our episode on linens, you should definitely go back and check that out. It's episode 167. We've learned a lot managing tens of thousands of guests. We learned a lot about linens, so I have all my best tips and tricks in that episode. We also kind of debunk the myth around thread counts. I know you've seen linens out there that say they're 1200 thread count or 1500 thread count and they're on Amazon for $39. That just doesn't add up. So we talk about thread count and really the max thread count that any of us need in our properties. Go back and check out episode 167 if you haven't already. So if your housekeeper doesn't have the ability to do all the linens in your short term rental, then they've got to go off site, right? They can do it at home, which could be a good solution. But the reality, these machines we have at home, residential laundry machines, they're not built to be doing tons and tons of pounds of laundry day in and day out. So a good second option can be to go to a laundromat to outsource to a laundromat too. And so there's a few ways to do this. Some laundromats offer what they call a wash and fold service, where you can simply drop off all your linens, or your housekeeper could drop off all the linens at whatever laundromat you guys decide on, and that laundromat can do all the service for you they usually charge per pound. The other option is to have Your housekeeper or maybe the housekeeping company you're working with actually do the laundry there in the laundromat. And most laundromats these days have some really large machines, 80100 pound machines, and it's more efficient, it's less wear and tear on the machines in the property and it actually does a better job of cleaning the, the linens too. These machines are built for commercial use, so they can run hotter temperatures, they can use stronger chemicals, they just do a better job of cleaning. So that's the second option. Your housekeeper or the housekeeping company you're working with can be dropping off the linens at a laundromat. And either Laundromat's doing them or they're doing them as well and just bringing them back with them the next time they're at the property. So if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, then you probably know I mentioned a few times and I went out and purchased a commercial property with plans to turn it into a laundromat. I actually learned so much about laundromats. I think they're a really fascinating investment and they, they can make a lot of sense. They have a, they're a real estate play, but it can also really help us with our short term rental portfolio. So that's sort of the natural progression for a lot of people that are building big short term rental portfolios if they're not outsourcing everything. So I didn't actually turn that property into full public laundromat, but I did end up buy four industrial size machines. And these things are like tanks. I mean, they literally, they brought them in on forklifts, they're bolted to the ground because if not they'll just spin out of control. And they do a lot of laundry and they do it really quickly. So I know not everyone needs that or has that option, but we do have a lot of experience with the laundry. And going to a laundromat can be the next best thing if laundry become a bottleneck for you. But there's also another service that's really becoming more popular now and that's a pickup in delivery service. So I learned a lot about this too when I was doing the research for the property and thinking about opening the Laundromat. A pickup and delivery service is basically a company that goes around on regular schedules, picks up your linens, washes them and brings them back. And I've worked with companies doing this as well. I would say that it was very expensive and the particular company that was working with wasn't very consistent. And so we took it in house and we started doing our own. And we have much cleaner, consistent linens all of the time. But this is worth looking into because especially in every big city, there are lots of these services around. These are the same services a lot of hotels use. A lot of hotels outsource their laundry and linens too. So if laundry is a bit of a bottleneck for you, I encourage you to just do a quick Google search, see if there's any pickup and delivery options available for, and you might find that they're more reasonable than the one that I worked with. One of the other benefits to using a laundromat as well, or to doing your linens off site is that you can soak any soiled linens. So what do I mean by this? If, if you have a big stain and a in a linen and you don't have time to wash that in the property, or maybe your housekeeping company's just throwing it out, knowing that it's stained. Well, you can, if someone's doing it off site, you can soak those overnight. You can use some high concentrate bleach that you can order off Amazon.com and then wash that linen in a commercial machine. And a lot of times you can recover those linens that you thought were damaged. Now, if the linens are actually damaged, I would definitely recommend filing a resolution. If you happen to be on Airbnb or if you're working on one of the other OTAs, we should be charging for these things. If someone's ruined linens, maybe not a little hand towel here or washcloth there, but if someone's actually ruining your linens, it's totally understandable and reasonable to be charging for those. So I encourage you to do that if you're not doing that already. Okay, so those are the laundry options in a nutshell. If you're just getting started, you have one short term rental and it's not a huge massive home, then laundry is probably not that big of an issue for you. But I know that you're going to have stained linens from time to time. And so maybe you can try some of these other things to recover some of those linens and take them every once in a while to a off site laundromat if your property's too big to be doing linens on site. Well, we definitely want to make sure that we always have fresh copies of linens for our housekeepers to change. Right. So that they can show up and there's no risk in not having linens for our next guest. But the second option is for your housekeepers or the company you're working with to do the linens off site, to do all the laundry off site. And there's several ways to do that. So they can drop drop off the linens and use what's called a wash and fold service. They can actually do it themselves in the property. Or you might want to do a quick Google search to see if there's a pickup and delivery service in your neighborhood, in your city that's offering this service as well. And for those of you out there that are really scaling your portfolio or you have a lot of properties in the same area, it's a natural progression. If you're doing housekeeping in house that you are probably going to want to invest in some sort of industrial commercial machines because they do a better job job washing. They do more at the same time, it's more efficient. They save a ton of water actually, so I guess it's better for the environment as well. They dry your linens so so quickly. I mentioned that a lot of laundromats will actually allow you to use their dryers for free because the washers spin the linens so quickly that they basically wring out all of the water, requiring hardly any dry time. The bigger machines also allow you to run at hotter temperatures, use different and stronger chemicals. So these are kind of the laundry options. Hopefully it hasn't been a huge challenge for you, but at some point in your STR journey, your operations have to change a little bit to handle the workload. So I hope that gave you a little bit of insight. And until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week.

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