Tips & Strategies – Hire the PERFECT house keeper

Hey, everybody, it’s Janine Sasso, your local Chicagoland realtor. And today’s episode is actually all about giving you a helpful tips and strategies on finding the perfect housekeeper for your home. I wanted to take the time and go over some strategies of finding a perfect housekeeper for your home. This one is really not related to the mortgage and real estate industry in that sense, but having a home oftentimes comes with a very time consuming task of cleaning the home, maintaining the home. And it’s for many of us, a time suck to really do all of this. So having a housekeeper is definitely a luxury, but for some of you, it might be well worth the consideration. The first thing you need to determine is the kind of service you want. Are you looking for more of an established company that will do all the screening and paperwork and handle the insurance for you, in which case you will most often have a rotating crew depending on who is available at your house. You will most likely have less of a personal relationship with them, but you will have definitely predictability and you have somebody there every year for every task that you will have them do. The other option is you choose somebody more private.

This ensures that you have a person there you can establish a relationship with. You can let them know what exactly you are expecting. They might be able to handle some additional things, such as letting off your dog or folding some laundry. Based on what your arrangements are for studies. Most people are happier if they go with the individual route. Now, the drawback on the individual route is that you cannot account for no shows or when people get sick because there’s oftentimes no backups and then there’s a skip week or there’s a week where you do end up doing it yourself. The second best tip we can give you is to look for recommendations from friends, families, coworkers, somebody that’s used their services before. Those are great resources for you to start your search with the third tip. Make a list of your needs and your ones having a detailed list available of what you expect. Room by room is really helpful for the person you are hiring. It takes the guesswork out of a new housekeeper and trying to get to know the house. Getting to know what your preferences are and getting to know your priorities. Writing it down and outlining is probably one of the most time consuming steps in this entire process, but it will also be the most helpful. The next step. Stick around for the first couple cleanings. I know many of us like to kind of disappear and come back to a miracle beautiful, clean house, but the first few cleanings. It might be helpful if you’re kind of around. Not necessarily right behind the person, but around so that you guys can communicate what’s important.

Where there should be more attention paid. You can also just tell them you really like what they did there. Because people do appreciate when you appreciate their work. Calculate the cost. Of course we want to know how much is it going to cost you because it varies on how frequently you have the people come. Do they have to just kind of maintain or is it always a deep clean? When they come to your house? You want to evaluate what is there, how long that take. You consider a fair market price for the cleaning. Are you providing your own cleaning product or are they bringing their own? There’s a couple factors you want to consider. On average, they’re in the marketplace. You’re looking at about 125 to 150 biweekly for the average four bedroom home with an average miss. Those are all very general terms. You can get it a lot cheaper. You can get it a lot higher. Prices go down to 70 bucks all the way up to 50. So you really have to evaluate what you’re looking for, how much maintenance and cleaning your house needs on a weekly, bi weekly or monthly basis, and then see where you fit in it on that scale. Understand what bonded and insured means now. Bonded to start with, for the homeowner doesn’t mean much.

It just means that the company is protected against theft from their employees. For the homeowner, however, what we want to make sure of is that there is insurance coverage if the company that is coming in to clean the home. They should be providing it with it. If it’s not a company and it’s an individual, you may want to check with your personal homeowner insurance if there is something that is covering you in case of an accident, somebody inside your own home. And if not, you should consider, if it’s worth it, to add. Oftentimes that cost is only a few dollars. And lastly, realize that trust takes time. Definitely not something that you’re going to gain on the first visit. It’s hard to give somebody the keys and alarm codes to your own personal home. Eventually, you might get there where the trust is established enough. You may want to just switch out an alarm code for when the cleaning crew comes. You may want to leave a key for that specific day, but it takes time to establish.

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