Kimberling City sits where MO-13 crosses Table Rock Lake on the Kimberling City bridge, and it is the lake's south-shore service town. About 2,300 people live here in Stone County. It was incorporated in 1973 and takes its name from the Kimberling family, who operated a ferry nearby -- which is a fair summary of the place: everything about it has been organized around the water and the crossing for a long time.
The demographics here are unlike anywhere else in this market, and they change what the work is. The median age is close to sixty, nearly four in ten residents are 65 or older, and more than half of all households are married couples. This is the purest retiree and second-home pool in the Branson area. Our customer here is not a host with a checkout deadline; it is an owner who wants the heavy, awkward parts of keeping a house handled on a schedule -- bathrooms, floors, kitchens, blinds, window tracks, the tops of things, the jobs that need a ladder or a knee.
A lot of these houses are also empty for stretches. Second homes on this shore sit closed between visits, and a closed house is not a clean house: dust keeps arriving through vents and door seals, water sits in traps, and anything left in a pantry has months to become somebody's problem. We run the same 42-point checklist on a recurring schedule for owners who are out of state, get the house opened up and ready before you drive in, and tell you plainly what we found while we were there. We are a cleaning company rather than a home-watch or inspection service, so we report what we see rather than promising to catch everything.
And it is a lake house, which is its own category. Boats, docks, wet shoes, screened porches, gravel and limestone dust coming up the drive, and a season of heat and humidity followed by a real Ozark winter. Screens, tracks, thresholds and entry floors take the brunt of it, and they are line items rather than upgrades on our list.
