The Most Expensive Part of a Turn Isn't the Turn — It's the Days You Wait

The average apartment turnover costs $3,872 per unit — and most operators quietly assume that money goes to paint, cleaning, and hauling out whatever the last tenant left behind. It doesn't. The single biggest line item is the rent you never collect while the unit sits empty. At roughly $60 a day in lost income across a 34-day average vacancy, that's about $2,060 gone per turn — more than make-ready labor, marketing, and concessions combined.

The data

Break a turn into its parts and the picture is uncomfortable. Make-ready labor and materials run around $1,500. Marketing and concessions are a couple hundred each. But lost rent — the meter running on an empty unit — is the largest slice by far. RapidEye puts the average turnover at $3,872 and average days-vacant at 34.4; Lula's 2026 benchmarks note lost rent alone typically accounts for 35–50% of total turn cost, and at RentCafe's national average rent that's about $60 for every day the door stays closed.

“The make-ready itself is a fixed, mostly unavoidable cost. The lost rent is not. It's a function of speed — and speed is exactly where most operations bleed.”

The problem

A turn doesn't stall because the work is hard. It stalls in the gaps between the work. The old tenant moves out and the ticket sits until someone notices. Then it's phone tag: call the cleaning crew, leave a voicemail, wait. Call the painter, get a callback tomorrow, schedule for next week. Nobody owns the sequence, so each trade waits on the last one to finish before anyone even knows it's done. Every one of those handoff gaps is a day — and every day is another $60 off the top.

Lula's benchmark for a well-run make-ready is 5–7 days. The typical PM takes 7–10. But the national days-vacant average is 34 — which tells you the real killer isn't the make-ready timeline at all. It's everything that happens around it: the routing, the waiting, the jobs that fall through the cracks because a voicemail never got returned.

The fix, by name

This is exactly what FYN's Crew + vendor dispatch is built to kill. The moment a turn ticket is created, FYN auto-assigns your in-house crew first — and if they're booked, it emails a ranked vendor automatically. No voicemails, no callbacks, no 'who's covering this.' The sequence moves itself, so cleaning, paint, and the final walk don't each cost you a day of phone tag. Paired with the Ticket board, every step of the turn is tracked report-to-resolved in one glance, so a unit never quietly sits waiting for someone to notice it's ready for the next trade.

What it looks like in practice

Book the demo

Lost rent is the one turnover cost you can actually move, and it moves the moment your dispatch stops running on voicemail. See it happen on your own portfolio: book a FYN demo and watch a live dispatch turn an empty unit around before the meter runs.