Every manager says a unit has to be guest-ready and very few say what that means. It is not a grading. It is a short list of things that generate complaints if they are missing, and it is mostly unglamorous.
The five that matter
- Everything works. Every light, every socket, every tap, the shower pressure, the oven, the extractor. The most common first-night message is about something that had been broken for months and nobody noticed because nobody was living there
- Getting in is simple. A door code or a lockbox, a lift that does not need a fob the guest will not have, and a concierge who knows they are coming. Access is where more stays go wrong than anywhere else
- It is properly clean, once. Not tidy. A deep clean before the first booking sets the baseline that every turnover after it maintains
- The basics are present. Linen, towels, hangers, bin bags, cutlery for more people than the unit sleeps
- Nothing of yours is left in it. A locked cupboard of owner belongings is fine. A wardrobe half full of coats is not
What the site visit is looking for
We walk the unit before anything is written down, and most of what we are checking is not the decor. It is the state of the appliances, whether the windows actually open, what the building is like to work in, whether there is somewhere for a cleaner to park, and how the lift booking works.
The last few matter more than they sound. A building with a difficult loading bay adds cost to every turnover for as long as we manage the unit.
You get the list either way
Including the parts we would leave alone. Owners routinely assume they need to renovate and usually they need to fix four small things and buy a lamp. If the unit is already there, we say so rather than inventing work.
And if it needs more than that, you hear it before you sign rather than after. A unit listed before it is ready collects the reviews it deserves in the first fortnight, and those reviews outlast the problem by a year.