Rental turnover cost calculator
Vacancy is the silent line item: it never shows up on an invoice, so it never gets managed. Enter your rent, your typical vacant days, and your make-ready spend to see what each turn costs, per turn and per year.
How this calculator works
The cost of a turn is two numbers added together, and only one of them feels like spending:
- Vacancy cost: daily rent (monthly rent ÷ 30) times the days the unit sits empty between tenants. Count from the day the old tenant hands back keys to the day the new lease starts, including the days lost to scheduling vendors, waiting on photos, and listing lag, not just the days work is actively happening.
- Make-ready spend: cleaning, paint, repairs, locks, and marketing costs for a typical turn. This is the visible number on receipts, and it's usually the smaller one.
- Turns per year: across your whole portfolio, so the calculator can annualize the damage. Four turns a year at three weeks each is often five figures of vacancy on mid-market rents.
The calculator then models a tighter turn of roughly 30% fewer vacant days, floored at one week because some make-ready work is unavoidable, and shows the savings per turn and per year. That 30% isn't magic; it's what closing the dead gaps between move-out, make-ready, and move-in typically recovers.
Where the dead days actually come from
Most vacancy isn't repair time. It's coordination time. The move-out walkthrough happens two days after keys are returned, so the punch list starts late. The punch list lives in someone's head, so the vendor gets scoped by phone and shows up missing materials. Nobody has photos of the unit's move-in condition, so an hour gets burned debating what's tenant damage versus wear. Listing photos wait until the paint dries. Each gap is a day or three, and at $60 a day on an $1,800 unit, a week of gaps costs more than the cleaning crew did. A structured turn is how the modeled savings become real: walkthrough the day keys come back, a written punch list with photos, vendors scheduled before move-out, listing drafted in advance.
Caveats
The calculator uses a 30-day month for the daily rate and treats make-ready spend as fixed across scenarios, since a faster turn doesn't usually change what you spend on paint. Hot and cold rental markets move the achievable vacancy floor more than process does. In a slow market, pricing and marketing matter more than turn speed. Use the annual figure to decide how much process is worth building, not as a guarantee.