Turns and make-ready
What a vacant day actually costs your portfolio
Lost rent is the obvious line. It is also the smallest one. Here is the full cost of a vacant day, including the four charges that never get attributed to the turn.
Everyone knows a vacant unit costs the rent. At $1,500 a month that is $50 a day, and it is the number that ends up in every deck.
It is also the smallest of the five costs, and the only one anybody attributes to the turn.
Lost rent is $50 a day and roughly half the real number
Start with the obvious one so we can move past it.
At $1,500 a month, a vacant day costs $50 in rent that is gone. Not deferred. You cannot bill for a day nobody lived there.
That figure scales linearly and it is easy to defend, which is why it is the one that gets quoted. The other four are harder to attribute, so they get absorbed into other line items and stop looking like turn costs at all.
Utilities keep running on a unit nobody lives in
A vacant unit is not a dormant unit. HVAC runs to keep the space from developing a moisture problem. Water heater stays on. Common-area allocation does not pause.
On a Class C asset in a hot market, expect $3 to $6 a day. It lands in the utilities line, where it looks like a utilities problem rather than a turn problem.
This is also where a slow turn starts compounding: the longer the unit sits conditioned and empty, the more you are paying to protect an asset generating nothing.
Marketing spend gets re-spent on a unit you already advertised
Every day a unit stays unavailable, the leasing team keeps paying to attract someone to it.
ILS listing fees, paid search, and the concession you eventually have to offer because the unit has been on the market long enough to look stale. Concessions are the expensive part and they are almost never traced back to the turn that caused them.
A unit that goes available on schedule leases at asking. A unit that shows up three weeks late competes against everything else that came online, and the price it takes to move it is a turn cost wearing a leasing costume.
Turnover cost is fixed per turn, so slow turns raise cost per occupied day
Paint, carpet, cleaning, punch labor, and materials are largely fixed per turn. Around $1,200 to $2,500 on a conventional unit depending on condition and market.
That total does not change if the turn takes 4 days or 14. What changes is what you got for it.
Amortize it against occupied days and the arithmetic turns unpleasant. The same $1,800 spread over a unit that was ready in 4 days is a better return than the same $1,800 on a unit that sat 14, because you bought 10 fewer days of rent with identical spend.
Physical occupancy can look healthy while economic occupancy drops
This is the distinction that matters to a lender and an owner, and it is worth being precise about.
| Physical occupancy | Economic occupancy |
|---|---|
| Counts units with a signed lease | Counts units where rent is being collected |
| A unit in turn is simply not counted | Vacancy loss reduces it directly |
| Can read 94% while NOI slides | Matches actual income performance |
| The number on the weekly report | The number owners and lenders care about |
A portfolio holding 94% physical occupancy with 11-day average turns is running materially lower economic occupancy, and the gap is exactly the money the turn process is losing.
Ayla lost $601,807 in a single year, on 340 units
Ayla Apartments is a 340-unit Class C community in Tampa, built in 1966, managed by ResProp. Its make-ready vacancy loss for one year was $601,807.
That is about $1,770 per unit per year, on a property where nobody was slacking. Techs traveled by golf cart between work orders and drove back to the leasing office to pick up the next one. They lost at least an hour of labor a day to moving around, and units sat while it happened.
After GetDone: make-ready time down 51%, vacancy loss down 55%.
The mechanism was not effort. It was that the work order lived on a desk in the leasing office instead of in the tech's pocket.
Add it up before you argue about the turn benchmark
For a $1,500 unit, per vacant day:
| Cost | Per day |
|---|---|
| Lost rent | $50 |
| Utilities and conditioning | $3 to $6 |
| Re-spent marketing and concession pressure | Varies, meaningful past day 14 |
| Turnover cost amortized over fewer occupied days | Rises with every day |
Call the hard, defensible floor $53 to $56 a day and understand that the soft costs are the ones that grow non-linearly once a unit has been sitting for two weeks.
Two days off an average turn is roughly $110 back per turn on the hard costs alone. Multiply by your own turn count for the year. Not by 100 units, and not by somebody else's turnover assumption.
Do this with your own numbers this week
Pull three things. Last year's turn count. Your average turn duration in days. Your average rent.
Multiply turns by days by daily rent. That is your make-ready vacancy loss, and it is usually larger than anyone in the room expects.
Then sort by property and look at the worst five. That is where the recoverable money is concentrated, and it is almost never spread evenly.
What did your number come out to?
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