Unit turns that hit the ready date

A unit turn overruns for a small number of reasons, and the biggest one is that nobody looked inside the unit until the day the resident left. By then the paint, the flooring and the appliance have not been ordered and the ready date was lost before the work started.

Inspect before move-out, not after

A pre-move-out inspection, two to three weeks ahead with the resident’s agreement, converts every long-lead item into an order placed in advance. It is the single change that moves turn times most, and it costs half an hour.

Work backwards from the ready date

Build the schedule from the date the unit must be available, not forwards from the day it empties. The order matters because several steps cannot overlap.

• •Clear and clean out, and a full inspection with photographs
• •Repairs: plumbing, electrical, appliance, doors and hardware
• •Flooring, which usually has the longest lead time and blocks everything after it
• •Paint, which cannot start until repairs are finished
• •Final clean
• •Final inspection with a checklist, and the keys

The four things that always block

• •Flooring lead time, which nobody checks until it is needed
• •One appliance, ordered late, holding an otherwise finished unit
• •A contractor booked for a day that moved
• •Somebody deciding mid-turn to upgrade something, which restarts the sequence

Photograph everything, twice

At move-out and at completion, every room, timestamped. This settles deposit disputes without argument, proves the condition the next resident receives, and gives you the baseline for the next turn. It takes four minutes and prevents most of the disagreements this process generates.

Track cost per unit, and look at the spread

Average turn cost hides everything. What you want is the distribution: most turns cluster, and a small number are two or three times the rest. Read the notes on those and you will usually find the same two causes, which are fixable.

Make the checklist the same every time

Turn quality varies with whoever ran it unless the steps are fixed and the photographs are required. A standard checklist on a phone also means the ready date is based on what has actually been done rather than on somebody’s estimate over the phone.