Earthblog

It is 3 o’clock on a Saturday in August.  A guest, waiting patiently for the keys to his rental house, wonders, “what is taking so long?’  Didn’t the previous guests check out at 10 o’clock?  Yes, they did.  And then… 

Approximately 21,053 private homes and 3000 hotel rooms from Hatteras to Carova ‘turn over’ every weekend on the Outer Banks.  About 60% of the homes have a Saturday change over.  That translates to over 12,000 kitchens cleaned, 63,000 beds remade, and 38,000 toilets scrubbed.  That’s just Saturday. A challenge, to say the least, but it gets more complicated.  There are 30,000 year round residents on the Outer Banks.  Very few locals clean cottages on the weekends.  As a result, we import our house keepers from as far way as Plymouth, NC – a 2 hour trip to Corolla,   In fact, the average housekeeper drives 240 miles to work and back every weekend.  At one Realty Company we surveyed has 224 cleaners for 620 homes – a low ratio relative to other rentals companies on the Outer Banks. That’s 2.7 five-bedroom homes per cleaner.   Could you clean 2.7 homes in 6 hours?  Probably not.  That's why most cleaners work in crews of two or three.  On Saturday, it works out to be about 3.7 homes per crew.  IT IS an exhausting day and then there is the 2-hour drive home, only to be repeated the next day.  It’s no wonder the average cleaner only lasts 2.5 seasons.  The housekeeping managers are constantly interviewing new cleaners to keep up with the demand as their supply of reliable staff dwindles. Then an imperfect world squeezes the schedule even further.  The most common delays are guests checking out late despite frantic phone calls from the rental company.  Or, they do check out on time but leave the house as if rock stars rented it for a week.  It takes the cleaning crew three times as long to clean the house, making them late for the other homes they still have to clean by 4 o’clock.  Sometimes, weekends throw curveballs.  Some actual examples: (1) The house was sold the week before and the new owner forgot to call the power company to continue service.  The power is cut off Friday and it doesn’t get turned back on until 3 o’clock on Saturday so the house doesn’t get cleaned until 3:30 pm.  (2) The guest leaving put a bag of ice in the kitchen sink and left hot water running on it.  Once the ice was melted, the bag created a plug in the sink as the water continued to run.  Four hours later, the housekeepers find the second floor flooded with two hours to clean the mess and the rest of the house, which includes one of the housekeeper’s 18th dirty toilets of the day. So the next time you’re wondering, “What is taking so long?”  Now you know.