What to Know About Staffing a Second Home

A home you are not always in still needs running, and that is its own staffing challenge.

A second home, whether a seasonal retreat, a frequent getaway, or one residence among several, presents a staffing puzzle that a primary home does not: it must be cared for, maintained, and kept ready even, and especially, when the family is not there. Getting that right is the difference between arriving to a home that is immaculate and ready and arriving to problems that have quietly compounded in your absence.

The central challenge is absence. A second home left empty for stretches still requires upkeep, security, climate control, maintenance, and protection against the slow troubles that unoccupied houses develop. Someone must keep the property sound while you are away and ready it for your return, which may come on short notice. This is why many families with second homes engage a property manager or a household manager for the location, or a resident caretaker or household couple, precisely to manage the home through the periods no one is living in it.

The second consideration is how to staff when the family is in residence. Options range from bringing primary-home staff along, which preserves continuity but adds travel and accommodation, to maintaining a separate set of staff at the second home, to a hybrid of key people brought and local help hired. For a home used seasonally, this overlaps heavily with seasonal staffing and rewards the same early planning. For a home visited frequently year-round, a small permanent local staff often makes sense.

The third is coordination across homes. Families with more than one residence benefit from clear systems, who is responsible for what at each location, how standards and preferences carry across homes, how staff communicate, so that every residence runs to the same standard and nothing falls through the gaps between them. A household or estate manager often holds this coordinating role.

And the fourth, as always, is vetting and trust. Staff at a second home often have even more autonomy than at the primary residence, since they operate while the family is elsewhere, which makes rigorous vetting and genuine trustworthiness all the more essential. People you rarely see directly are running and protecting a valuable home; they must be people you can fully rely on.

We staff second homes and multi-residence households, placing property managers, household managers, caretakers, household couples, and seasonal and year-round staff, and helping families build the coordination that keeps every home running. A second home should be a pleasure to arrive at, not a problem to manage, and the right staffing is what makes it so. At Nannies + more…®, it is the standard behind every search we conduct.