Make-ready turnover cleaning in Austin
Insured · Written cleaning scope · One point of contact · 5.0 stars from 12 Google reviews · Austin, TX
Same-day short-term rental turns and full tenant make-readies across Austin — photo-documented every turn, quoted flat per unit, one insured accountable crew.
For a unit-turn quote: Share the bedroom and bath count, unit condition, access details, and checkout/check-in or lease-ready date. Confirm that maintenance is complete before the final clean. Bailey & Bear handles the cleaning only; repairs are outside our scope.
For a vacant unit, make-ready cleaning covers kitchens and bathrooms; the insides of cabinets, drawers and appliances; baseboards, vents, glass and floors; and a final reset after maintenance punch is complete. The property manager supplies access, the turn-board date and the inspection standard, while the written scope separates a light turn from a heavy clean and states how a re-clean is routed. Repairs, appliance service and post-construction dust are separate work rather than hidden inside the cleaning line.
They get bought as one line item and they are not one job. Confusing them is the single most common reason a turnover quote and a turnover invoice do not match.
Hours, not days, usually between an 11am checkout and a 4pm check-in. The unit is furnished and stocked, so the work is reset and restage: strip and remake beds, launder and restock what the property holds, reset the kitchen and baths, and leave the room matching the listing photos. Speed matters because the window is fixed by someone else's booking.
Days, not hours, on an empty unit. Nothing is staged and nothing is hidden: insides of cabinets, drawers and appliances, baseboards, vents, marks on walls, the smell the last tenant left. The bar is not clean enough for tonight, it is clean enough to show and to lease, which is a deeper and slower standard.
An office, suite or retail space changing hands between occupants. Closer to a make-ready in depth, but scheduled around a building's access rules rather than a lease date — badge, freight window, escort and building access approval before anyone gets in the door.
Tell us which of the three you are actually buying and the quote stops being a guess. If the space is coming out of construction rather than out of an occupancy, it is neither — that is construction site cleaning, a different scope with a different problem in it.
Short-term rental work is not a smaller house clean. It is a scheduled, documented, repeatable operation, and the properties that run well are the ones that treat it that way.
We run turns the way property managers run them: assigned per property, against a task list with an expected duration, and photographed at completion. Where a portfolio is managed in turnover software — Breezeway and its equivalents — we work inside the platform rather than beside it, so the record of each clean sits with the rest of the property's history instead of in a text thread. That matters more than it sounds. When the owner is in another state and the next guest arrives at four, the photo set is the handoff.
It is also what makes a damage claim survivable. A stain found and photographed at eleven in the morning is a documented incident with a timestamp. The same stain reported by an angry guest at seven that evening is an argument nobody wins.
Almost nothing that goes wrong on a turn is a cleaning problem. It is a stocking, data or maintenance problem that only becomes visible when somebody is standing in the unit with a few hours left on the clock. These are real ones, off real turns:
A unit listed as one bedroom that is actually two. That is not an admin typo — bedroom count sets the scope, the time on site and the rate tier, so a wrong number means an under-scoped clean and an under-billed turn, every single time, until someone catches it.
Fitted sheets staged for the wrong mattress depth. The beds still have to be made, the clock does not move, and the fix is a stocking decision nobody made.
A comforter with pet hair, staining and odor that genuinely cannot be reused — and no second comforter stocked anywhere in the unit. Somebody has to decide, that hour, whether the guest arrives to a bare bed or a bad one.
Pet soiling on a living-room couch. That is a documentation and fee question, not a scrubbing question, and it needs photographs before the next guest arrives, not an explanation afterwards.
A washer and dryer at the property that both simply do not run. On-site laundry is often the assumption the whole turnaround window is built on, and when it fails the schedule fails with it.
A clean performed on a property that was never opened as a task, so it is invisible in the system and invisible on the invoice. Work that is not recorded is work that quietly does not get paid for.
We report every one of these the day it happens, with photos, rather than cleaning around it and letting you find out from a guest review. It is worth agreeing three things before the first turn: who stocks the spares, who owns appliance maintenance, and what the pet-damage and trash-out path is. Sorting those out in advance costs one conversation. Sorting them out mid-turn costs a booking.
On a tenant make-ready the unit is empty, which sounds easier and is not. Everything the furniture used to cover is now visible, and the standard is a space that shows well to the next prospect rather than one that merely passes at a glance.
The honest limit of a cleaning scope is that a fair amount of what a vacated unit needs is not cleaning. Scuffed and marked drywall, a door that will not sit right, missing caulk, paint that has stopped being touch-up and started being a repaint — no amount of scrubbing fixes any of it, and most cleaning vendors' involvement ends at photographing it and handing the list back to you.
Bailey & Bear documents those conditions with photos and routes them to property management before the final clean. The cleaning scope starts after trade work is complete; repairs, paint, punch, HVAC, plumbing and appliance service remain outside our scope.
The report names the room, surface, condition, and whether the item blocks the next cleaning step. Property management can then schedule the correct trade, confirm completion, and release the unit for the final reset. That sequence keeps cleaning time focused on appliances, cabinets, restrooms, floors, glass, fixtures, and the presentation standard the next occupant will see.
A turnover is quoted as a flat per-turn rate, set by bedroom and bath count, unit size and the condition we can expect to find. You get the number in writing before the first turn and it holds, so the line item is predictable across a month of bookings rather than re-negotiated every time.
What we will not do is fold turnovers into a commercial per-visit band. The $130 to $350 per-visit range published on our commercial cleaning cost page is for commercial spaces on a route — an office, a clinic, a retail floor. A furnished residential unit with linens, a kitchen reset and a fixed guest deadline is a different job on a different clock, and quoting it off the commercial band would just mean re-pricing it later. It gets scoped on its own.
Two things move a turnover quote more than square footage: how many beds have to be stripped, laundered and remade, and whether laundry happens on site or leaves the property. Both are worth stating up front.
We launder and stage what the property stocks, and flag it when the stock is short or wrong. We do not warehouse replacement linens for your units.
A dead washer, a failing HVAC unit or a plumbing fault gets reported with photos the same day, not repaired by us — those are licensed trades. We clean only; repairs are outside our scope.
Fine drywall dust does not come out in one pass and is not a turnover. That is a separate scope — see post-construction cleaning.
We will commit to a same-day window on a unit we have scoped with access confirmed. We will not commit to one sight-unseen, because that is the promise that gets broken at four o'clock.
Short-term rental owners and hosts, property managers running scattered or multifamily portfolios, realtors preparing a listing to show, and commercial operators handing a suite from one occupant to the next. Austin and the surrounding Central Texas areas we already work in — downtown, East Austin, Westlake, Lakeway, Round Rock, Pflugerville and Dripping Springs.
Fully insured, Bailey & Bear provides make-ready cleaning in Austin with a written scope and one point of contact., and one owner accountable from the first walkthrough onward — so when a turn goes sideways at 2pm the escalation does not have to travel through an account manager who has never seen the unit.
A single unit turn is a cleaning question. Forty of them in three weeks is a scheduling question that happens to involve cleaning, and vendors who fail at it rarely fail because the work was poor. Austin leases are heavily summer-ending — the university calendar and the relocation season land on the same weeks — so a community turning a handful of units in a normal month turns several times that in the back half of summer, against the same leasing dates, with the same maintenance team.
That changes what you are buying. In a normal month you buy a standard. In turn season you buy how many units a vendor can finish on the day you need them finished — a function of crew count and route, not of the per-unit rate on the proposal. A rate that looks good in February is irrelevant in July if the vendor fields six cleaners against your twelve ready units.
The four questions that separate turn vendors, and none of them is about price:
Our position, stated so you can hold us to it: we commit to a unit count per day rather than vague availability, we say no when a week is full instead of accepting work and arriving short, and in a heavy window we agree the priority order before it is needed rather than during the call where it is. Buying across several properties rather than one community? The contracting side — onboarding, insurance naming, approvals, who the invoice goes to — is on property management cleaning.
A regional manager is not judged on how clean a unit was. They are judged on days vacant. That reframes the whole job: cleaning is not trying to be excellent in isolation, it is trying not to be the reason a unit sat. Almost every turn that goes badly goes badly at a handoff rather than during the work.
| Stage | What it needs from cleaning | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Move-out inspection | Nothing yet — but the unit should be photographed before anyone touches it. | A clean that starts before the inspection is documented destroys the evidence for any deposit claim. Once it is wiped, the damage is arguable. |
| Maintenance punch — paint, drywall, flooring, fixtures | Usually a rough clean first on a heavy unit, so the trades are not working in the last tenant’s mess. | Scheduling the final clean before punch is finished. Paint dust and caulk smears land on a finished unit, and the clean gets blamed. |
| Final clean | An empty, finished unit and confirmed access. Insides of cabinets, drawers and appliances; blinds, vents, baseboards; the smell. | Arriving to a unit where a trade is still working. The crew either waits — paid, idle — or cleans around them and returns. |
| Final inspection and photos | A named person who signs off, and a re-clean route for anything that fails. | No agreed inspection standard. “Not clean enough” with no list is the most expensive sentence in a turn, because nobody can act on it. |
| Listing and show-ready | Nothing further, unless the unit sits. | A unit vacant for weeks needs a touch-up before showing, and nobody budgets for it. Dust returns; the photos were taken on day one. |
The two-clean pattern is what quotes most often leave out. On a lightly used unit, one clean is right. On a heavy unit — or any unit getting flooring or a full repaint — a rough clean before the trades plus a final clean after is cheaper than one clean done twice, because the second visit on a failed unit costs a day of vacancy as well as a crew. Decide which units get which at the walkthrough, and price both, so the second visit is never a surprise invoice.
Bailey & Bear provides make-ready cleaning in Austin with a written scope and one point of contact.
Turnover work sits inside our wider Austin commercial cleaning service. If you manage a portfolio rather than a single unit, start at property management cleaning. For recurring coverage on a schedule rather than per-occupant resets, see janitorial services. For a unit coming out of a build or renovation, see post-construction cleaning, and for hotel, venue and guest-facing work see hospitality cleaning. For turnovers on Lake Travis, see hospitality and turnover cleaning in Lakeway. For a single vacant house or rental rather than a managed community, see move-out cleaning in Austin, and when the unit was left full or in heavy condition, house cleanouts and trash-outs or heavy-duty house cleaning.
Timing and depth. A short-term rental turnover happens between guests, often inside a few hours on the same day, and its job is to reset the unit to the exact condition the listing photos promise. A make-ready happens between tenants, usually with days rather than hours, and it takes an emptied unit back to lease-ready: appliances, insides of cabinets and drawers, baseboards, marks on walls, everything the last occupant left behind.
Same-day turns are normal for short-term rentals and we schedule to the checkout and check-in window rather than to a vague morning slot. What we will not do is promise a same-day turn on a unit we have not seen, on a day with no confirmed access. Tell us the window and the unit and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.
Yes, and we run them the way property managers run them: assigned per property, with a task list and expected duration, and photographed at completion. If your portfolio is managed in turnover software such as Breezeway, we work inside it rather than beside it, so the record of the clean lives where your other vendors' records already live.
Every turn. Photos at completion are the whole point of turnover work, because the owner is usually not there and the next guest arrives before anyone else looks at the room. Photographs are also how a damage claim survives: a stain found and photographed at 11am is a documented incident, and the same stain reported by a guest at 7pm is an argument.
You hear about it that day, with photos, before the next occupant walks in. We have found pet soiling on furniture, a comforter that could not be reused, a mattress protector that was gone and a washer and dryer that both simply did not run. None of that is cleaning work, and all of it changes what the next guest experiences, so it gets reported rather than quietly cleaned around.
We launder and stage what is stocked at the property, and we will tell you plainly when the stock is wrong: fitted sheets that do not fit the beds, or a single comforter with no spare when the one on the bed cannot be reused. We do not warehouse replacement linens for your units. Deciding who holds the spares is a stocking decision worth making before a turn, not during one.
As a flat per-turn rate, set by bedroom and bath count, unit size and the condition we can expect. That is why an incorrect bedroom count in a property profile matters: it is not an admin detail, it sets the scope, the time on site and the rate. We scope the unit, quote the number in writing, and hold it.
No, and we will not pretend one number covers both. The $130 to $350 per-visit band published on our commercial cleaning cost page is for commercial spaces on a route, such as an office or a retail floor. A residential turnover is a different job with different linens, different fixtures and a different clock, and it is quoted per unit.
No. We clean only; repairs are outside our scope.
Yes. Portfolios, multifamily and scattered short-term rentals run on one plan with one point of contact instead of a different vendor at every address. If the portfolio is the reason you are here, the property management cleaning page is the better starting point.
Austin and the surrounding Central Texas areas we already work in, including downtown, East Austin, Westlake, Lakeway, Round Rock, Pflugerville and Dripping Springs. Access is the practical limit, not the map: gate codes, lockbox or smart-lock detail, parking and a named contact for anything we cannot get into.
That is a capacity question rather than a cleaning one, and we answer it in numbers. Tell us the community, the unit count you expect and your lease-end dates, and we will tell you how many units a day we can hold and what we are already committed to that week. If a week is full we say so rather than accepting work and arriving short — in turn season a vendor who is late is worse than one who declined.
Heavy units usually do, and it is cheaper than it sounds. A rough clean before maintenance punch keeps the trades out of the last tenant’s mess; the final clean happens after paint, flooring and fixtures are finished. Booking a single final clean before punch is complete is the most common reason a unit fails its inspection and loses a day. Light units take one clean, and we decide which is which at the walkthrough rather than on the day.
Confirmed access, confirmation that maintenance is actually finished in that unit, a named person who signs off the inspection, and an agreed standard for what a pass looks like. Those four are the entire difference between a turn that closes and one that gets re-cleaned. The most expensive failure in a turn is not a missed surface — it is a crew arriving at a unit where a trade is still working.
The best make-ready service for summer turn season is the vendor that can plan against your lease-end board, state a realistic unit count by crew, separate light and heavy turns, document final inspection, and define the re-clean path before keys start moving. Compare capacity planning, access workflow, turn-board updates, and escalation ownership — not only the per-unit rate.
Compare move-out cleaning vendors on how they receive the move-out inspection, confirm that maintenance punch is complete, price each vacant unit by condition, document the make-ready, and route re-cleans. A property manager needs a vendor whose scope matches the turn board and inspection standard, not a residential checklist reused across multifamily units.
Share the community, projected unit count, lease-end pattern, access process, and inspection standard so the walkthrough can follow your turn board.
Tell us what needs to be cleaned, reset, turned over, or covered.