Vacant Units Now Take 35 Days to Lease

A unit goes vacant. The clock starts. Thirty-five days later, on average, someone finally signs. That's five days longer than a year ago and nearly double where it sat in mid-2021 — and a big chunk of those days aren't spent finding a renter. They're spent waiting on a turn.

The number

Apartment List's February 2026 data puts national time-to-lease at 35 days, up five days year over year and close to twice the mid-2021 pace. Other trackers put the median list-to-lease window even higher, at 41 days. Either way the direction is the same: the vacant-unit clock is running longer, and it's running while the national vacancy rate sits at a multi-year-high 7.3%.

Here's the part that stings: the actual make-ready work — clean, paint, repair, inspect — only needs 3 to 7 days. So if the whole cycle is 35 days and the physical turn is a week, the other three-plus weeks are coordination drag. Dead time. Rent you're not collecting because a work order is sitting in someone's inbox.

The problem this exposes

Every vacant day has a price, and it's not small. On a $1,800 unit, a single extra vacant day is roughly $60 gone — and if coordination drag is adding a week to every turn across a 200-unit portfolio, that's real money evaporating between move-out and move-in.

And the drag is almost never the labor. It's the handoffs. The move-out inspection flags six items. Someone has to call the painter, who's booked. The punch list lives on a clipboard, then a text thread, then a sticky note. The plumber shows up before the unit's been cleaned, so he leaves. Nobody's sure if the appliance repair got scheduled. The leasing team can't market a unit they can't confirm is ready. Each of those little stalls is a day — and days are exactly what the data says operators can't afford anymore.

“The make-ready is a dispatch problem wearing a maintenance costume. The work is quick — getting the right person to the right unit in the right order, without phone tag, is where the week disappears.”

The fix, by name

This is exactly what FYN's Crew + vendor dispatch is built to eliminate. The moment a turn punch list exists, FYN auto-assigns your in-house crew first — the people already on payroll, already on-site — and only emails an outside vendor when the crew is booked. No calling around. No guessing who's free. No unit sitting idle because the one person who knew the plan was out sick. The turn moves in sequence instead of stalling between trades.

Pair that with FYN's Ticket board, where every make-ready item is tracked report-to-resolved in one glance, and the leasing team can see a unit go green the instant it's ready to market — instead of waiting for someone to walk down and check. Fewer handoffs, fewer dead days, faster back on the market.

What it looks like in practice

Stop paying rent to an empty unit

The market is handing operators longer vacancies whether they like it or not — 35 days and climbing. The days you can control are the ones lost to coordination, not craftsmanship. FYN's Crew + vendor dispatch closes that gap: crew first, vendors when needed, every make-ready item tracked to done, the unit back on the market before the drag sets in.