While every professional cleans their short-term rental thoroughly between guests, this coronavirus merits taking additional action to disinfect the property and prevent the spread of disease. We’ve used the protocols advised by global health organizations including the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization to create Properly’s COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist for short-term rental disinfection. 

The good news is that the virus is not airborne, which means it can only be transmitted through contact with someone else’s bodily fluids. However, since the virus may be able to live for up to nine days on surfaces, you need to disinfect the touch points in your rental in case someone infected has coughed into their hand and touched a surface in the property. 

Disinfecting a property is different from cleaning it. Here’s our full guide on how to disinfect a short-term rental. 

You and your cleaners can also download the Properly app for free and use our included Peace of Mind checklist for your next clean. It’s a modifiable checklist that includes all basic turnover tasks as well as the tasks in the COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist, which are advised by global health organizations including the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization. 

You can send any checklist or combination of checklists to your cleaner along with all the necessary information for the turnover - such as your property details, the time of the job, and the fee for the job. They can then use the app to guide themselves through the disinfection process. 

With the Properly app, you can also request verification photos for specific tasks so you can see they were completed. If you ask for a photo of the empty refrigerator after it’s cleaned, for example, you’ll know for sure the cleaner remembered to clear the last guest’s leftovers.

Checklists are used by pilots and surgeons to ensure that they don’t miss critical tasks. As just one example, WHO implemented a new surgical safety checklist to reduce complications and deaths, and announced the results in 2009: the checklist reduced the number of complications by 34% and the number of deaths by more than 40%. 

Why do checklists work so well? According to Atul Gawande, the author of The Checklist Manifesto, it’s because human error interferes constantly with our ability to carry out a succession of tasks - even if we are highly trained to perform those tasks. 

Implementing checklists drops the number of errors dramatically. To check an item off our list, we have to pause in real time, and ask ourselves whether we’ve completed the task. If we ask ourselves later, we might forget. Did you lock your front door this morning? You probably did. But are you sure? 

Now imagine I asked you the same question this morning immediately after you left the house. If you had locked the door, you’d confidently say yes. If you hadn’t, you’d say “oh, wow, I forgot! Thanks for reminding me!” 

That’s exactly how a checklist works at your property. If your cleaner has already performed the task, they can check it off with confidence. If they forgot - which happens to the best of us - the checklist will remind them. 

And for tasks they’ve never done before, like disinfection? Visual checklists like Properly’s show them exactly what needs to be done, so that it’s easy to complete a task even if they’re unfamiliar with it. 

We created the COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist and the Peace of Mind Checklist to address this specific health crisis. We want to make sure that best practices that can prevent the spread of this disease are followed by everyone in this industry. 

We created these checklists to clearly spell out exactly what those best practices are and make it easy to implement them immediately. Even if your cleaners have never completed these tasks before, the Properly checklists should make it possible for them to correctly disinfect your rentals by following the visual guidelines in the app. 

Our COVID-19 Disinfection checklist and Peace of Mind checklist were created using the best available advice from the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization, and have been reviewed by our own industry professionals. We will continue to keep our checklists up-to-date as new information about COVID-19 becomes available.

Proactive communication is key. Make sure they know that you understand their concerns and want to keep their properties safe as much as they do. We liked Harvard Business Review’s Communicating Through the Coronavirus Crisis, and we’re actively working on our own crisis communication plan for our industry. Sign up here to get email updates. 

When talking to your owners, show them that you’ve done your research on how COVID-19 is spread and how you can protect their property. Clearly lay out the preventative measures you are taking to make sure their property is disinfected after every guest checks out. (We recommend using Properly's COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist or Peace of Mind Checklist.) 

If you have an Pro plan with Properly, you can also use owner sharing mode to give your owners access to the tasks completed and the verification photos sent after every turnover at their property. (Owners can ONLY see the property you allow them to see; they will not see other owners’ properties.) This will assure owners that every precaution is being taken.

Remote Inspection is a verification service Properly provides for busy managers. You can ask your cleaner to send you verification photos of essential tasks at your property to be absolutely sure they got done. If you don’t have time to double-check your cleaners’ verification photos in real time, our team can do that for you. 

If we spot a mistake, we’ll let your cleaner know right away so they can fix the issue before they leave the property. This saves you time - no one has to go fix the mistake later on - and prevents the issue from ever affecting your guest. 

During this time where every guest is hyper-concerned about cleanliness, any tiny slip in your normal cleaning process can make them think your cleaners are being lax about their standards. If they see a T-shirt a previous guest left behind in a drawer, for example, it might make them worried that this property wasn’t thoroughly cleaned overall - even if your cleaner did everything else perfectly. 

Remote Inspection prevents these errors and gets a second person’s eyes on the property to spot anything out of place. Learn more about Remote Inspection here, or talk to our team about getting it here. 

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we’re waiving the onboarding fees for all managers who would like to implement Remote Inspection. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to double-check their processes during this difficult time. 

You absolutely can, and we’ve made it easy for you to do so. Here’s a link to access our free email templates for talking to your guests, your owners, and your service providers. We've created proactive versions if you'd like to reach out to your guests and owners now, and reactive versions if you need help managing cancellation requests. 

You can also add the following text to your listings so that new guests know what precautions you’ve taken to protect their health: 

This property uses the Properly COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist, which follows cleaning and disinfection guidelines provided by the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization. All of our properties are cleaned thoroughly, and we have disinfected our bathrooms, kitchens, and major touch points like light switches, doorknobs, tabletops, electronics, appliances, and control panels. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about how we’re protecting your health. 

If you prefer not to mention COVID-19 specifically, use this text instead: 

This property uses the Properly Peace of Mind Disinfection Checklist, which follows cleaning and disinfection guidelines provided by the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization. All of our properties are cleaned thoroughly, and we have disinfected our bathrooms, kitchens, and major touch points like light switches, doorknobs, tabletops, electronics, appliances, and control panels. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about how we’re protecting your health. 

Your service providers should follow guidelines to protect themselves from infection, including washing their hands correctly immediately on entering the property and using disposable or rubber gloves while they clean. 

Service providers should absolutely not clean properties if they have any symptoms of illness, to protect both themselves and your guests. 

You can help your service providers during this difficult time by charging additional fees for the extra time it will take to disinfect your properties between guests. You can add these fees to your usual cleaning fee, and explain the extra charge to guests. 

Guests will be reassured that you are putting in extra work to keep them safe, and you will be able to pay your service providers a little extra for each job to make up for the fact that there may be fewer bookings.

We recommend adding the following text to your listings: 

This property uses the Properly COVID-19 Disinfection Checklist, which follows cleaning and disinfection guidelines provided by the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization. All of our properties are cleaned thoroughly, and we have disinfected our bathrooms, kitchens, and major touch points like light switches, doorknobs, tabletops, electronics, appliances, and control panels. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about how we’re protecting your health. 

If you prefer not to mention COVID-19 in your listings, here is an alternative text: 

This property uses the Properly Peace of Mind Checklist, which follows cleaning and disinfection guidelines provided by the CDC, EPA, and World Health Organization. All of our properties are cleaned thoroughly, and we have disinfected our bathrooms, kitchens, and major touch points like light switches, doorknobs, tabletops, electronics, appliances, and control panels. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about how we’re protecting your health. 

You should be as candid with your guests as you can. This is a worldwide pandemic, and we don’t know how many people are infected. There is no way you can guarantee that a guest who has stayed in your property was not infected. 

What you can do is guarantee that you have taken every precaution advised by the world health authorities to eradicate any risk of transferring that infection to the next guest. The protocols we used to create this checklist are those advised for people who need to disinfect residential homes after someone with COVID-19 has stayed in them. They are the highest possible standards for ensuring infection does not spread in a residential home. We are closely monitoring updates from all of the major health organizations and will notify all our users and modify the checklists immediately if any protocol changes are recommended. 

We simply don’t know. It’s a new situation and it’s evolving rapidly. We’ll continue to produce the best resources we can to keep everyone informed during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’d like to join our mailing list for updates, you can do so using the form below.