Short-term rentals do not fail on big things. They fail on a blocked shower drain, a toilet that runs all night, and a door that will not lock properly at midnight.
This is what to check, ordered by how often it actually turns into a message from a guest.
Every turnover
Run every drain under load. Not a trickle — fill the basin and let it go. A shower that drains slowly today backs up on Saturday. This is the single most reported problem in Miami short-lets, because guests use water differently from residents and older buildings have less margin.
Flush every toilet twice and listen. A fill valve that keeps running is silent during the day and deafening at 2am in a one-bedroom. Check the pan does not rock.
Run the hot water until it is hot. Time it. If recovery has got noticeably slower, the heater is scaling and you have warning before it fails mid-stay.
Check under every sink. The cabinet is where a leak shows first and where nobody looks. Two seconds with a hand on the trap.
Check water pressure at the shower and kitchen faucet. Low pressure is nearly always a scaled aerator, not the building. Unscrew, soak, refit.
Lock and unlock every door with the key or code. Including the keybox. A guest arriving at midnight to a lock that needs lifting is the most stressful failure on this list.
Run water in every unused fixture. A guest bathroom nobody used between stays gets a dry trap, and a dry trap smells. Thirty seconds prevents it.
Every month
- Descale shower heads and aerators
- Check the water heater’s relief valve and look for damp in its pan
- Inspect sealant around tubs, showers and countertops — guest use accelerates everything
- Test smoke and CO alarms, and change batteries on a schedule rather than on failure
- Tighten towel rails, hooks, shower rails and anything guests pull on
Every year
- Flush the water heater. In Miami-Dade’s hard water this is the highest-value item you can do
- Inspect the main drain line if the property is in an older building
- Replace flexible supply connectors and angle stops if the property is over about fifteen years old
- Check the washing machine hoses, which are the most common cause of a large water loss
Give the list to your cleaner
Cleaners are in every room of the property more often than anyone else, and they notice things before guests do. If they can flag issues directly to whoever fixes them, most problems get resolved before a guest ever meets them.
The alternative is finding out through a review, which is permanent.
Keep a record
Note what was checked and when. It matters twice: you can see a pattern developing — recovery times creeping up, the same drain slowing — and if a guest disputes something, “the drain was clear on the 14th” is a different conversation from “I think we checked it”.
What guests actually complain about
Review text is remarkably consistent, and almost none of it is about plumbing failing. It is about plumbing being mildly unpleasant, which is a much cheaper problem to have and a much cheaper one to prevent.
Water pressure is the most common single complaint, and in Miami it is usually scale in the showerhead rather than anything structural. A ten-minute soak restores it.
A smell in the bathroom is almost always a dry trap in a shower or a floor drain that nothing has run through since the last guest. A jug of water down it between stays ends the complaint permanently.
Hot water running out is a sizing mismatch, not a fault: a tank that suits a couple does not suit six. Worth knowing before the listing says it sleeps six.
A toilet that runs is the one guests notice at night and mention in the morning. It is a flapper, and it is a ten-minute job.
None of those will generate a maintenance call. All of them generate a sentence in a review that sits there for years.
Building the turnover into the clean
The checklist only works if it belongs to whoever is already in the property. A separate maintenance visit that happens monthly will find things two weeks after a guest has already found them.
Three things make it stick: keep it to items that take under a minute each, put it on the same sheet as the cleaning list rather than a different one, and make the record a photograph rather than a tick. A photograph of a clear trap or a flushed aerator is evidence for the next damage dispute as well as a maintenance record.
Before a high-season run
Before a block of back-to-back stays, do the annual items early rather than on schedule. Flush the water heater, run every fixture including the ones nobody uses, check the angle stops under each basin turn, and clear the traps. An hour before the season costs less than one cancelled booking during it.