Unit turns

Turn time is the only maintenance metric that lands in NOI.

Every other number is a labor line. A vacant day is rent you will never collect, and the make-ready is the part you control.

Request a demoWhat is a good turn time?

Ayla cut make-ready time 51% across 340 units.

The board

A whiteboard cannot tell you which unit is behind.

It also cannot tell you which tech is overloaded, or document a repair for an insurance claim.

The GetDone make-ready board. Four stage columns, Move-out through Ready, each unit on its own card with the date it entered the stage. Above them: 61 units in turn, 9.1 day average turn time, 18 ready to lease, 4 past target.
Every unit sits in a stage, and every stage carries the date it started. The four numbers along the top are the ones a regional asks for.

Every stage timestamped

Move-out, scope, paint, carpet, punch, clean, inspect, ready. Without stage timestamps you know a turn took 11 days and nothing about where it went.

One board, every unit

List, board, or grid view of every unit in turn, with a progress bar per unit. Replaces the whiteboard only the supervisor can read.

Handoffs that do not drop

Paint finishing notifies carpet. The schedule stops living in one person's head, which is what breaks when that person takes a week off.

Days vacant, per unit

Units in turn, average days vacant, units ready this week, units past their available date. The four numbers a regional actually asks for.

Ayla Apartments

$601,807 of vacancy loss in a single year.

A 340-unit Class C community in Tampa, built in 1966. Techs traveled between work orders by golf cart, then drove back to the leasing office to pick up the next one. Paper from start to finish.

  • At least an hour of labor lost per tech per day, to travel alone

  • Work orders collected from a desk rather than pushed to a phone

  • Slow turns meant vacant units sat longer

  • 51% reduction in average make-ready time after GetDone

  • 55% reduction in vacancy loss, same property, year over year

Run it on your own portfolio

At $1,500 a month, a vacant day costs $50. Two days off an average turn is $100 back, per turn.

Multiply by the turns you actually did last year. Not by a per-100-units figure, because your turnover rate is the variable that makes those extrapolations wrong.

Sort properties by average turn descending and look at the top five. That is where the recoverable money is concentrated, and it is never spread evenly.

What actually slows a turn

Three of the four causes are information problems.

Which is why working harder does not fix it.

  • The handoff. Paint finishes and nobody tells carpet, so the unit sits two days between trades.

  • Materials. The tech arrives, the part is wrong, and the unit waits on a delivery nobody tracked.

  • Scope discovery. A cursory move-out inspection means real damage surfaces on day four and resets the schedule.

  • Travel. On a spread-out campus this is not trivial. Ayla lost an hour a day per tech to it.

A single unit's turn on a phone. Four stages listed down the screen: move-out complete with keys returned, in turn with paint in progress and the tech's name, punch and QC not started, ready with a target date. A footer reads day 5 of a 9 day target, on track.
The same stages, per unit, on the phone of whoever is standing in it. Paint finishing is what tells carpet to start.

FAQ

Turn time questions

What counts as the start of a turn?
GetDone measures move-out to move-in ready, because that is the definition the P&L agrees with. It includes the days nobody scheduled anything, which is usually where the time actually goes.
Will techs actually use it?
94% of them do at ResProp. The reason is narrow: the work order is on their phone instead of on a desk in the leasing office, so using it is faster than not using it.
Does this replace our PMS?
No. Work orders, units, users, and statuses sync from ResMan automatically. GetDone is the layer the field actually works in, and the PMS stays the system of record.
What if our make-ready scope varies by property?
Turn task templates are configurable per property, and preventative schedules can target by year built and market, so a 1966 Class C asset does not inherit a 2025 lease-up checklist.
How fast does turn time actually move?
Ayla cut average make-ready time 51% and vacancy loss 55%. That was one 340-unit property that had been running on paper, so treat it as the upper end of what process change alone can do.

Bring us your five slowest turns.

We will show you which stage they are sitting in, and what the make-ready board does with them.

Book a demosales@getdonehq.com
Request a Demo