Exterior Cleaning on Rental Turnover: The Checklist Property Managers Use

The checklist, in the order the work has to happen

Gutters and downspouts first, including a flush to confirm water actually exits at the discharge. Then the roofline: soffit, fascia, eave corners, porch ceilings, and a full cobweb sweep, which is the single item most turn crews miss and the first thing a prospective tenant sees standing at the door. Then the house wash. Then exterior glass. Then screens, pulled, washed flat, and reinstalled in their original openings. Hard surfaces last: driveway, front walk, patio, entry landing. The sequence is not preference. Wash the windows before the siding and you will do them twice, because soft-wash runoff carries dissolved grime down the glass. Clean the driveway first and it collects everything from above. Add exterior light globes, the mailbox post, and the storm door track while a crew is on site; those are minutes, not line items. Photograph the completed exterior the same day, before the listing shoot.

What the turn costs against what the vacancy costs

Real numbers on a 2,000-square-foot single-family rental. Window cleaning starts at $199 and prices by pane count, so a 22-pane house lands in the $250 to $340 range. Screens are $50 on top. Gutters start at $199. House washing is $0.18 per square foot soft-wash, so roughly 1,800 square feet of wall area is about $325. Pressure washing is $0.20 per square foot, so a 600-square-foot driveway and walk is about $120. A full exterior turn typically totals $500 to $800, done in one visit. Now the other side. Single-family rents across Ada and Canyon County commonly run $1,700 to $2,200 a month, which is $57 to $73 for every day the unit sits empty. If a clean exterior and better listing photos cut days-on-market by even a week, the package paid for itself and returned change. That is the entire financial argument, and it only works if the turn is fast.

When not to buy this, and what a manager can do in-house

We would rather lose the line item than get the callback. Skip the full package on a lease renewal with the same tenant; nothing about it improves retention. Skip it on a ten-day January turn where the incoming tenant has already signed, because you are paying for photos nobody will look at. On a fourplex where the rear elevation faces a fence and never appears in a listing, do the street-facing side only and cut the bill in half. And on a single-story with 18 accessible windows and no hard-water damage, exterior glass is an honest DIY job: a hose, a $25 twelve-inch squeegee, a bucket of clean water, about three hours. Hire out when height is the reason, when there is hard-water buildup that needs restoration work, or when your maintenance tech's hourly rate makes it a wash. Cobweb sweeps and gutter downspout flushes are also well within a competent in-house crew.

Wear and tear versus damage: what a deposit can actually cover

This is where turn cleaning gets contested. Idaho Code 6-321 gives a landlord 21 days to return a deposit, or up to 30 if the lease says so in writing, and requires a signed written itemization of any deduction. Normal wear and tear cannot be deducted. Two years of dust, pollen, cobwebs, and rain spotting on glass is wear and tear on any reading, and charging a routine window cleaning to a deposit is the kind of deduction that gets reversed. What is defensible is damage: adhesive residue from tenant-installed window film, spray paint overspray, tar or stain splatter from a tenant project, grease and nose prints from a pet the lease did not allow, or a screen frame bent out of square. The practical rule managers we work with follow is that condition restored to the move-in photos is the owner's cost, and condition below them is chargeable. Confirm your own policy with counsel.

What a turnover cleaning cannot fix

Say this to the owner before the invoice, not after. Sprinkler overspray that has hit the same windows for three or four Idaho summers etches the glass. Our water is hard, and mineral left to bake in dries into the surface rather than sitting on it. A cleaning removes deposits; it does not remove etching. Once the surface is pitted, the options are a professional restoration polish, which is priced separately and does not always fully succeed, or replacement glass. Same story elsewhere. Chalky, oxidized siding on a west elevation that has taken twenty years of sun will not come back with soft-washing; that is a paint job. Deep oil in old concrete lightens but rarely disappears. Fiberglass screen mesh that has gone brittle and grey will tear on the cleaning table, which is why $50 screen service on a 1990s rental sometimes ends in a replacement quote instead. None of that is chargeable to a departing tenant.

Weather windows and pressure limits that wreck rental exteriors

Exterior glass has a floor. Below about 35 degrees, water freezes on the pane faster than a squeegee clears it, and the valley sits below that most mornings from late November into February. Book winter turns for interior glass and plan exterior work for the first stretch above freezing. Soft-wash chemistry wants a surface above 40 degrees and out of direct sun so it dwells instead of flash-drying. Pressure is where cheap turn bids do damage: vinyl siding tolerates about 1,200 to 1,500 PSI with a 25- to 40-degree tip held back a foot, painted wood and LP-style composite should be soft-washed under 500 PSI, composite decking wants 600 to 800 with a 40-degree tip, and concrete takes 3,000 with a surface cleaner. A 4,000 PSI wand run tight on siding drives water behind the lap and stripes the wall permanently. Reflekt uses 100% deionized water on glass, no soap, so nothing dries into a film on the sills.