We’re Liz and Rhys.
There’s no account manager here, no head office and no rota of people you’ve never met. When you ring JJ Cleaning, you get one of us. When we quote your property, we’re the ones who’ll be cleaning it.
How this started
Rhys started seventeen years ago with a ladder and a bucket, cleaning windows in Eastbourne. That grew into Smart Services, doing gutters, exteriors, valeting, commercial work and general cleaning across East Sussex — which he still runs.
JJ Cleaning came out of something more specific. We bought a property, furnished it, listed it, photographed it, wrote the listing, dealt with the guests and cleaned it ourselves between every single stay. We called it Paradise. We made every mistake there is to make with a holiday let, on our own money, before we ever did it for anybody else.
That’s the bit that turned out to matter. Cleaning a holiday let is a skill. Running one is a different skill, and most people who offer one don’t have the other. We learned both the slow way, on a property we couldn’t afford to get wrong.
We now look after 34 holiday properties across East Sussex, from a two-person bolthole to a seventeen-bed house near Cooden.
“We had a wonderful stay and could not have asked for a better place to spend the morning of our wedding. The whole property was spotlessly clean, incredibly comfortable, and had such a welcoming feel. It really made it a home away from home.”
The two of us
Liz
Liz runs the holiday-home side — the listings, the rates, the guest messages, the bookings and the properties themselves. If you’re an owner, Liz is who you’ll mostly deal with, and she’s the one who’ll be at your first three cleans working out how your property needs to be looked after.
She’s also, by her own admission, the one who cares more than is strictly necessary about how a bed looks when it’s finished. Which is not a bad trait in someone doing your changeovers.
Rhys
Rhys handles the practical side — the maintenance, the exteriors, the jobs that need a ladder or a van, and the seventeen years of knowing which trade in this town actually turns up.
If something’s broken at your property on a Sunday, Rhys is generally the answer.
What we’re actually like to deal with
Rather than a list of adjectives, here’s what we’d want to know if we were you.
You can get hold of us. Day or night, one of us answers. That’s not a service level we’ve invented for a website — it’s the thing our owners mention most, and it’s why the number is at the top of every page.
We’ll tell you the unwelcome thing. We don’t promise occupancy, ever. We tell owners their first year will probably be slower while reviews build. If we can’t hit your turnaround, we say so rather than take the booking and hope. We’d rather lose a job than talk someone into one.
We don’t hide anything. Most of our owners have full access to their own listing — every rate, every message, every enquiry. You shouldn’t have to ask us for a report about your own property.
Your success is the whole point. We take a percentage, which means if your property does badly, we do badly. That’s deliberate. It’s also why we’ve never charged anyone to set up a listing or take photographs, and never will — a better listing earns more for both of us.
We’re local, and we’re staying. We’re members of our local BNI chapter, we live here, and our name is on this in a town small enough that it matters.
How we make sure it’s the same every time
The honest problem with a personal service is that it doesn’t scale by itself. Two people cannot clean 34 properties. So the thing we’ve actually built is not a cleaning round — it’s a way of making a team clean like we would.
Liz or Rhys attends the first three cleans at every new property. From those visits we write a brief for that property and photograph how every room should look finished. The primary team learns your property from that brief. The primary team then trains the secondary team who cover when they’re away.
Every cleaner photographs every clean, and the photos come to us the same day. We check them. If a detail is drifting, we deal with it in week two.
It’s more work at the start than most companies will do. It’s the reason the fortieth clean looks like the first.
The other half of what we do
Between us, Liz and Rhys have been looking after property in Eastbourne for over seventeen years. Rhys started out as a window cleaner and built Smart Services, which still handles general cleaning, commercial work, exterior work, valeting and waste clearance across East Sussex.
JJ Cleaning is the side of the business built specifically for holiday-let and rental-property owners. Same two people, same standards — but a dedicated team, dedicated processes and dedicated systems for changeovers, tenancies and holiday-home management. Looking after a let property is a genuinely different job from cleaning a family home, and it deserved its own setup.
So when you hand us the keys, you’re getting a specialist service backed by seventeen years of doing this properly in this town.
Would you rather ask an owner?
We’ll put you in touch with someone whose property we already look after. We do this for most new owners, and we’d encourage it — it’s worth more than anything we could write about ourselves on our own website.