Once a month. A seasonal rental sitting empty through a Miami summer needs one short check-and-refresh visit every month: run water down every drain so the P-traps don’t dry out, confirm the AC is still holding humidity down, look for leaks and pest signs, dust, and flush the toilets. Mold and bugs, not dirt, are what ruin a closed unit.
That’s the whole of it. If you’d rather have someone else keep it up, tell us about your place and we’ll send a price for it — nothing is booked until you say so.
Why an empty unit needs a schedule at all
Nobody tracks in sand while the unit is closed, so the dirt stops. Water and air don’t. A P-trap — the U-bend under every sink, shower and floor drain — holds a plug of water that seals the room off from the drain line, and in a warm, unoccupied condo that plug evaporates on its own in a matter of weeks. Once the seal is gone the drain is an open pipe: odor comes up it, and so do the insects that were already living down there. That is why the first thing an owner notices walking back into a closed unit is so often the guest bathroom nobody used.
Pouring water down every drain — sinks, tubs, showers, the laundry-closet floor drain, the one behind the water heater — restores the seal in about ninety seconds. Flushing each toilet does the same for its bowl trap and keeps standing water from staining a ring somebody has to scrub later. In a vacant unit, those two minutes are worth more than the dusting.
The three levels, in order
A seasonal year has three kinds of visit in it, and confusing them is the expensive mistake:
- The closing clean, on the way out. The biggest visit of the year, because anything left behind gets months to become a problem. It is a deep clean, not a turnover — starting at $349, a 4–6 hour visit with a 2-person team, 42 items verified by photo. The full list of what gets emptied, unplugged and propped open lives in our post on preparing a Florida home before leaving for the summer.
- The monthly vacant visit, all through the empty months. Short, repetitive, and boring on purpose. It isn’t cleaning to make the unit look better — it’s going in so that somebody lays eyes on the unit. That is the level this post is about.
- The arrival deep clean, before the first booking back. The reopening: fabrics, linens, the refrigerator interior, AC vents and returns, and a mildew walk-through of closets and baths. We’ve already written what that arrival clean should include, and the order to run it in.
What the monthly visit actually does
In a closed unit, half the work is checking and half is refreshing. This is the round:
- Every drain and every toilet — including the ones in rooms nobody enters, which are exactly the ones that dry out first.
- The thermostat and the humidity readout. Confirm the system is running and the number hasn’t climbed. If the AC quit in week two, the whole point of the visit is that somebody finds out in week three instead of in December. The settings themselves are their own post: what temperature to leave the AC on when you leave a Florida home.
- A leak sweep. Under every sink, behind the toilets, the water-heater pan, the AC drain pan and its condensate line. Drips that only matter because nobody is there to notice them.
- Pest signs. Droppings along baseboards, an ant trail on the slider track, wings by a window, a bait station that emptied. We report it with a photo; treating it is the pest-control company’s job.
- Fabrics and closets. Pillows, mattresses, and the back of any closet on an exterior wall — where mildew shows up first in a closed unit.
- A light cleaning pass. Flat surfaces, kitchen, bathrooms. It is little work because nothing got used — which is the point: it keeps the film from setting.
- The refrigerator, however it was left. If it was left running and empty, wipe it and prop the door; if it was switched off at closing, confirm it is still dry and still propped.
- Dated photos. Not of the pretty parts — of what the visit found. It is the half of the visit you can show somebody later.
The visit is documentation as much as cleaning
Two kinds of owner ask for this schedule: the ones who lost a unit once, and the ones who sat down and read their own policy. Many landlord and dwelling policies treat a property left unoccupied for a stretch of weeks differently from an occupied one, and some vacancy endorsements attach conditions — periodic inspections among them. We are not your insurance agent and this is not legal advice: read your own policy, or call the agent whose name is on it, and find out what your carrier expects before the season rather than after a claim.
What we can say operationally is that a recurring visit produces something useful either way: a date, a set of photos, and a note of what was and wasn’t there. On eligible completed visits, the CleanCheck report is where that lands. Whether it satisfies your carrier is your policy’s call, not ours — but having the record costs nothing next to not having it.
What it costs, honestly
JAS does not publish a vacant-property-check price, and we are not going to invent one here: the visit runs shorter than a turnover in some units and longer in others, depending on how many bathrooms, how many floor drains, and whether there is an outdoor space in the mix. What is published are the anchors on either side of it.
An Airbnb turnover starts at $179, described on that page as a 1–2 hour visit with a 2-person team, 20 items + dashboard photo audit. A standard residential clean starts at $189, a 2–3 hour visit with a 2-person team, 28 items verified by photo, and up to 15% off HomeCare on recurring plans. A vacant-unit visit looks like the first in shape and the second in rhythm; the price gets built around your unit, under the rule our Terms put in writing: “We price before you commit: you request a quote, see it, and then request a time.”
Because it isn’t a line item you pick on your own in the booking flow, setting it up is a conversation: phone, text, WhatsApp, or email — all four channels sit on our contact page. Tell us the unit, the ZIP, how many bathrooms, and which months it sits empty, and we come back with the visit list and the price.
Where the visit stops
A monthly visit finds things; it does not fix them. We are not plumbers, HVAC technicians, or a pest-control operator — when the crew reports a drip under the water heater or ants on the slider track, the repair belongs to another trade, and the value of the visit is that you call them in July instead of finding out in November.
And there is one hard boundary. Our published Terms let us refuse or stop service where conditions are unsafe for our team — such as mold, infestation, biohazards, or abusive behavior. Surface film and a closed-up smell are cleaning. Visible, spreading mold is a remediation professional’s work, and the honest thing a cleaning company can do at that point is say so and stand down.
FAQ
Is once a month really enough, or should someone go weekly?
Monthly matches what actually changes in a closed unit: drain traps that lose their seal over weeks, humidity that drifts slowly, pests that leave signs before they settle in. Move to every two weeks if the unit has a history of leaks or pests, if it sits without air conditioning, or if a policy or association rule you are working under asks for more. Weekly is a schedule for occupied properties.
Can the visits happen with nobody in Florida?
Yes — that is the normal case. A door code, a lockbox, a smart-lock invite, or a key left with the front desk is enough, and the crew works with nobody home. On eligible completed visits, the CleanCheck report shows the checklist status and photos afterward, so you see the unit from wherever you are.
If you visit monthly, do I still need the deep clean before the first booking?
Usually yes — and it is a smaller job because the monthly visits happened. A unit that was checked all summer does not come back with the settled film of one that sat sealed for six months, but the pre-booking visit still has to reach everything a guest touches: linens, every fabric surface, the refrigerator interior, and the vents and returns. Our arrival-clean post itemizes that visit.