Agencies and other headaches, keys and cleaners, running costs and contracts...in short, all the things we spend so much of our time doing behind the scenes.<br>
I'm a newbie to this site, who has been lurking a while and finding many of the posts extremely helpful.
We are just getting our 3 bed cottage in Sidmouth, Devon up and running to let, hopefully by Easter.
I'm having a hard time finding a company that can do the changeover clean. I've had a quote from one, but with nothing to compare it to, have no idea if £133 (includes call out/management) is reasonable or not. It certainly dents the old bank balance in low season. Just to give you an idea, our prices range from £485 -1080, without the 22% (plus VAT!!) commission.
I would be very grateful if anyone out there knows of any companies they could recommend, or indeed advise if this quote sound about right.
Hi Ripley, welcome to LMH we have cottage in Sidmouth too!
£133 per changeover sounds expensive. Does that include laundry & meet & greet? And what do they mean by management? Also, how many beds and bathrooms do you have? We have 1 king, 2 singles and 1 family bathroom so I'm guessing yours will be more expensive for cleaning and laundry, but that still seems steep.
I can recommend Lyme Bay Linen & Laundry in Seaton who collect/drop off weekly to lots of Sidmouth holiday cottages. They charge by the item plus a small delivery charge.
We found it hard to find cleaners who could be flexible - we like to offer Monday or Friday changeovers with other days over the winter. We now have cleaners who can always do Friday's and do Monday's most times as long as we set the arrival time an hour later. For other days we have to check with them before we take the booking or just accept that there might be some gaps between guests leaving and the next time that the cleaners can get there. Usually not an issue in low season when we wouldn't expect back to back bookings anyway.
Jo
Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
You don't say if you are doing anything yourselves, I assume you are managing remotely.
We have a place near Sherborne and have a local cleaner who has been fantastic. I doubt she can help you but it can give you an indication of costs. Our place has 2 bedrooms, with a Kingsize and 2 single beds. She typically takes 2 hours to clean at £12 per hour plus around £30 for the laundry (we provide towels, tea towels, oven gloves etc). So a typical clean is £55. Sounds like your place is 50% larger so £80 would be reasonable.
Our cleaner does a great job but we also make sure we go at around every 4 weeks and do a deeper clean, moving all of the furniture, cleaning skirting etc but we are a bit OCD
Last edited by ianh100 on Sat Feb 06, 2016 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If you are being charged 22% + VAT it sounds as though they are your local agency - I presume they are also getting the bookings for you?
Is the cleaning of £133 per changeover on top of the agency fee or included?
Whose providing the linen, towels, etc?
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Ah thanks for your posts guys, it's really appreciated - Jo - I had noticed a few posts from you on this forum , as we live up in Cheshire and have our cottage in Sidmouth too ! It's a 3 bed - 2 kings, I double and 2 bath so I realise cleaning costs might be a bit more.
We have had the cottage a while but this is the first year going into the holiday let business, so we wanted an agency to manage the bookings to start us off. So far I am still deciding between Cottages4U and holidaycottages.co.uk. They charge 22% plus Vat. The £133 from a "holiday home propery management " company is additional and includes the clean, laundry, key holding (!) guest liaison during stay (not meet and greet) and 24/7 call out. Not much left to pay the mortgage in low season !
Jo- I will definitely check out the Laundry service in Seaton you mentioned. And since this post, I have a possible private cleaner who may be interested.
Thanks so much everyone, it's really useful to get an idea of costs and this site is great for support and advice !
We're off site too (we actually live in Harrow) and we've always organised everything ourselves. In fact, I wonder if adding another company into the process would over complicate things. If we hear about anything needing doing from the guests or cleaners then I organise it. We have the numbers for local plumbers, electricians, locksmith, gardener and handy man, that we found either from recommendations from neighbours, local small ads or web searches.
Most things can be sorted with a couple of emails or phone calls and very rarely is anything truly urgent. In over 10 years we've had a couple of plumbing issues that we wanted sorting the same day to avoid water damage and that did take a bit more ringing around to find someone. I imagine that it depends on your day job - if you're not free to drop everything and sort out an emergency then maybe it's worth paying a management fee. But it is a rare occurrence.
In terms of 'guest liaison' - we find that the vast majority of our guests don't contact us during their stay. We give them lots of information before they arrive and leave clear instructions in the house for all the equipment, central heating, rubbish arrangements, etc. Our phone numbers and email are on everything so it's not that we're discouraging them.
Occasionally we might get a text along the lines of 'we can't find the iron' and then I can suggest places previous guests might have put it. I'm not sure a management company would be much help with things like that.
We've never needed a 'key holding' service because we use key safes. There's one for the guest keys that the cleaner puts the keys in as part of her 'refresh' before they arrive and, at the end of stay clean, she makes sure it's empty if there are no incoming guests. There's a second key safe just for the laundry company, gardener, etc. with a different code that the guests don't know. The codes are changed regularly.
Search LMH for 'key safe' and you'll find a few threads about the pros and cons, and which type to go for.
Jo
Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
Joanna wrote:We're off site too (we actually live in Harrow) and we've always organised everything ourselves. In fact, I wonder if adding another company into the process would over complicate things. If we hear about anything needing doing from the guests or cleaners then I organise it. We have the numbers for local plumbers, electricians, locksmith, gardener and handy man, that we found either from recommendations from neighbours, local small ads or web searches.
I think this works very well until it doesn't - and you need to have someone locally you can trust to give you an honest opinion in these situations. For example, the guests complain about the cleaning and want their money back; your cleaners say that the cottage is perfectly clean and the guests were extremely rude to them. If you have no-one else to call on to assess the position, you're a bit stuck.
