Cleaning House: An Interview with Cleancio founder Rocio Lane

Vincent Simboli
Jul 10, 2017 · 6 min read

A few years ago, Rocío Lane stayed in an apartment listed on Airbnb while traveling abroad. The place was lovely, but poorly-cleaned. Dirty floors, dust, and sheets that had clearly not been washed left Rocío feeling like an anonymous head-in-a-bed: a source of money instead of a guest in someone’s home. Rocío ended up spending most of her trip cleaning the apartment.

Rocio Lane, founder of Cleancio

At the same time, she was renting out her own home via Airbnb and had lost out on several last-minute “instant bookings” due to her cleaning team being unavailable. On a good day, she would be able to get home and clean the place herself before the guest arrived, but more than once, Rocío lost revenue on her bookings due to the last-minute nature of these emergency cleanings. Even when she was able to clean the home before the guest arrived, she had to pay for supplies and trash pickup fees.

Sometimes Rocío would be able to get a professional last-minute cleaning from an established cleaning company, but these cleanings were prohibitively expensive and the cleaners rarely knew how to prepare the home according to Rocío’s high standards. These operational costs added up to the point that it barely made sense to list her property for rent.

Like many entrepreneurs before her, Rocío furrowed her brow and said to herself “there has got to be a better way to do this.” In the burgeoning home-sharing economy, both guests and hosts benefit tremendously from a fast and thorough cleaning. It’s also critical that the cleaner understands who will be seeing the home. Pre-check-in cleaning isn’t simply a matter of making the home ready for personal use: the guest must feel welcomed from the moment they step through the door.

Rocío realized that instead of relying on third-party cleaners, she could be the one to provide the better cleaning service. She decided to buckle down and quit her job to start Cleancio, a cleaning company that focuses on a large but underserved vertical: homeowners who list their properties as vacation rentals in Chicago.

Cleancio is Chicago’s premier Vacation Rental cleaning company

Rocío explains that Cleancio’s laser focus on the short-term rental (STR) market in Chicago has given them a competitive advantage that has allowed them to scale rapidly. “We are much more than a cleaning company. We are a part of the guest experience,” says Rocío with a smile.

“We’re almost always the last people to see the property before a guest checks in, and we’re usually the first afterward. Our team is the one that handles pre-stay quality audits, as well as maintaining post-stay checklists for many of our clients. We put in that extra focus on the guest experience that other cleaning companies do not, and that makes a big difference.”

Rocío knew from an early age that she wanted to be part of the hospitality and tourism industry. After completing a degree in Tourism Administration at Universidad Mayor de San Andres in her native Bolivia, she decided that if she wanted to be a major player in the hospitality world, she would need to travel to the USA and improve her English. In order to gain a better understanding of the role of property valuation in the industry, Rocío got her realtor’s license and began to work as a real estate consultant focused on the investment value of homes in Florida’s Treasure Coast. She relocated to Chicago and began to work at Spothero, a successful tech startup that solves the challenge of finding on-demand parking.

Image courtesy of Spothero

After immersing herself in Chicago’s startup ecosystem at Spothero, Rocío’s interest in entrepreneurship blossomed. She did the mathematical legwork and concluded that the volume of cleanings required for a typical vacation rental property in Chicago– a city with between 5,000 and 7,000 active listings on Airbnb alone– would generate significant revenue for a cleaning company that focused on these properties.

According to Rocío’s estimates, most properties that are rented out during high travel season require an average of three cleanings per week. Compared to the bi-weekly or monthly cleaning schedules common to most corporate contracts, an STR-focused cleaning company could do quite well for itself. Charging their clients per cleaning and per property size would further increase Cleancio’s revenue projections.

3+ bedroom apartments generate significantly more revenue than other sizes. Data courtesy of airdna.co

Because higher bedroom counts tend to be more profitable in high-travel season, hosts with larger properties would theoretically be willing to spend more on high-quality cleanings.

Chicago’s Revenue (yellow bars) during high season is in the 83rd percentile nationally. Data courtesy of airdna.co

Rocío’s initial calculations were correct. The high returns of Chicago’s STR market proved to be so strong (reaching the 83rd percentile of revenue nationally) that hosts were willing to pay a premium for high-quality cleanings.

Cleancio was able to quickly establish itself as the go-to cleaning service for upmarket vacation rental properties with a lightning-fast turnaround. Given that a significant part of STR revenue comes from last-minute bookings, Cleancio has been a godsend for vacation rental owners in Chicago in the past year.

When I asked about her sales process, Rocío told me that Cleancio’s brand promise often sells itself.

“We specialize in fast turnaround and same-day cleanings with extremely short notice. Vacation rental hosts are extremely familiar with the hard parts of coordinating early check-ins, late check-outs, left-behind items, and reliable quality audits. They know we understand these challenges too, and they trust us.”

Additionally, Rocío’s business is one that generates long-term value for STR hosts. A guest’s first impression of a property is often the a key determinant of their overall experience and likelihood of a return visit. There is a demonstrable link between long-term profitability and repeat guests due to the fact that repeat guests do not require marketing expenditures: they already know what they can expect from a lodging, how much it costs, and what their experience should be. “The most important part of the guest experience is the check-in,” explains Rocío. “Your prospects for repeat business aren’t so good if your place isn’t properly cleaned.”

When she started spreading the news that she was quitting her job to start a cleaning company focused on Chicago’s STR market, Rocío was met with substantial skepticism, and many questions along the lines of “Are you sure you can handle running your own company?” She tells me that while managing a successful business feels great, the best part of Cleancio’s success has been proving the critics wrong and establishing herself as an entrepreneur of merit in Chicago’s booming hospitality economy.

Want to see your Vacation Rental property truly shine? Book a cleaning with Cleancio today!

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Telling the stories of the hardest-working innovators in the Hospitality Industry. All thoughts author’s own.

Vincent Simboli

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Roads Go Ever On. Thoughts are my own and do not represent my employer.

Welcome Home

Telling the stories of the hardest-working innovators in the Hospitality Industry. All thoughts author’s own.

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