By Roshan L. D’Silva · Guide To Holiday Renting
A house you love is not automatically a house that lets well. The gap between them is mostly storage, linen and information — in that order.
The owner's closet, first
If you do one thing before letting, do this: create a lockable cupboard or small room that guests cannot open.
Into it goes everything you would mind losing or would rather not share. Your clothes. Papers and documents. The good knives and the wine. Photographs. Spare keys. The children's things. Anything sentimental, anything valuable, anything irreplaceable.
Without it, letting means either stripping the house of everything personal before each arrival, or accepting that strangers will use your belongings. Both wear thin within a season, and the second is how owners end up resenting a perfectly good rental business.
A solid door and a good lock on an existing cupboard is enough. It does not need to be beautiful; it needs to be locked.
Then the janitor's cupboard
Separately, and not locked: somewhere for the working things. Mop, bucket, vacuum, cleaning products, spare bulbs, fuses, batteries, the toolkit, the stepladder, pool chemicals if you have a pool.
One place, labelled, so your cleaner is not hunting and a guest can find a mop when a bottle breaks at ten at night. It sounds trivial. Ask any changeover cleaner what costs them time and this is near the top.
Declutter properly — more than you want to
A holiday house full of the previous owner's ornaments and your own surplus furniture reads as tired in photographs and takes longer to clean.
Take out everything that is not either useful or genuinely good. Clear surfaces photograph better and clean faster, and both of those turn into money. The bar to keep something is not "it is fine" — it is "a guest would be pleased to find this".
Linen: buy like a hotel, not like a home
This is where owners under-invest most, and guests notice most.
- White, always. It looks clean because it can be proven clean, it bleaches, and every piece matches every other piece for ever. Coloured and patterned linen fades unevenly and dates.
- Three sets per bed. One on, one in the wash, one on the shelf. Two sets fails the moment a changeover meets a wet morning.
- The same across the house, so nothing needs sorting by room and any piece replaces any other.
- Towels: bath, hand and a separate pool or beach towel per guest, in a different colour so they do not end up on the sand. This one change prevents most towel losses.
- Protectors on every mattress and pillow. Cheap, invisible, and they are what stands between one accident and replacing a mattress.
Buy commercial-grade rather than domestic. It costs more once and survives several times as many washes.
The document that answers the questions
Every house has quirks, and every quirk you do not write down becomes a message to you at an inconvenient hour.
Write one short, legible guide — not the manufacturer's manuals in a drawer — covering how the oven, hob, heating, cooling, washing machine and television actually work; the wi-fi name and password in large type; where the water stop-tap and fuse box are; rubbish and recycling days; and who to call, in order, when something breaks.
Add the honest quirks. The tap that needs a firm hand. The door that sticks in damp weather. The switch by the door that is not the light. Guests are entirely forgiving of a quirk they were told about and irritated by one they discover at midnight.
What makes a house feel considered
Not expense — attention. The list is short and cheap.
- A first-night basket: tea, coffee, salt, oil, sugar, loo roll, washing-up liquid, a bottle of something local.
- Books, games and cards. A shelf of paperbacks, two or three board games, a pack of cards. These are what people remember about the wet afternoon.
- Your own recommendations, written by you: the good bakery, the restaurant worth booking and the one to avoid on a Sunday, the quieter beach, the market and its day, the walk with the view. One page, kept current. It is the single most-photographed thing in most holiday houses.
- Practical local listings: doctor, pharmacy, dentist, taxi, the nearest hospital with an emergency department, and the number of your caretaker.
- Blackout in every bedroom, and lamps rather than one overhead light.
Then photograph it
Only once all of the above is done. A house photographed before it is properly prepared has to be photographed again, and the photographs are what decide whether anyone books at all. We cover that later in this series.
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