Vilamoura is apartment territory, not villa territory. And that changes the whole logic: instead of one property with twenty units, there are twenty properties with two or three units each, in the same building.
The opportunity lies exactly there. Working apartment by apartment is expensive for everyone. Working the building or the block in one go changes the price and the logistics.
Working by condominium
It is the most efficient way of dealing with a building in Vilamoura, and it is little used because it needs someone to organise it.
How it works: the building management or the condominium manager gathers the interested owners, we survey the units, and the work is done over one or two consecutive days, apartment by apartment.
What each owner gains from this:
- The quantity discount applies to the total of the batch, not to the two units in their apartment
- The travel and the setting up of the equipment are done once for the whole building
- They do not need to arrange anything individually, or be present if they leave a key or access
What the condominium gains: units in good order across the apartments, fewer complaints about damp and smells, and a supplier with a record of what was done in each apartment.
With two units per apartment, a batch of ten apartments is twenty units — and the difference between €60 and €50 per unit + VAT is €200 + VAT spread across the group.
High-turnover holiday rentals
Vilamoura is one of the areas with the highest density of short-term rental apartments in the Algarve. Loulé, the municipality Vilamoura is part of, has more than five thousand registered holiday rental units and is the municipality with the most overnight stays in the region.
High turnover means two things for the equipment. It runs practically non-stop from June to September, with different people touching the thermostat every week. And it is judged by strangers, every week, on a public platform.
An apartment where the air conditioning smells damp when switched on loses points for it, even when the cleaning of everything else is impeccable. It is the kind of comment that stays written and that nobody deletes.
The marina air
Vilamoura has a geographical feature worth mentioning: much of the built area is a few hundred metres from salt water, between the marina and the coastline.
The main effect of salinity is on the outdoor unit, not the indoor one — the condenser and the aluminium fins visibly corrode faster here than inland in the municipality. It is not our work, but it is what we see, and we say so when we find it.
On indoor units, the effect is indirect: fine particles that enter with the air and saturate the filters faster. Nothing that one clean a year does not solve.
Most properties here are apartments with two or three indoor units, many of them rented short-term through the summer. If you own or manage several apartments in the same building, ask us about a batch job. The best time is October to March, when the apartments are empty and there is no pressure to finish before the next arrival.
