The Number Nobody Calculates
A tenant gives notice. Your immediate thought: "I need to find a new tenant." Your second thought: "How fast can I get it listed?" Your third thought — the one most landlords never have: "How much is this actually going to cost me?"
If your answer is "one month of lost rent," you're dramatically undercounting. A recent survey of over 5,000 landlords found that 59.64% report turnover costs exceeding $2,000 per unit. The actual average ranges from $1,750 to $3,872 — and when you include the cost of your own time, the realistic midpoint lands around $4,000.
Summer is peak turnover season. Lease renewals cluster in May and June. Move-outs follow in June through August. If you have units turning over in the next 10 weeks, here's what that's actually going to cost.
The Full Cost Anatomy
Turnover costs aren't one expense. They're six, and most landlords only count one or two of them.
Vacancy Loss: $1,500-$3,000
This is the one everyone knows. Unit sits empty, rent stops flowing.
Even in a healthy rental market, expect 2-4 weeks between tenants. That includes the make-ready period, listing time, showing period, application processing, and lease execution. At $2,000/month rent, two weeks of vacancy costs $1,000. Four weeks costs $2,000. In a softer market — or during the inevitable delays — six weeks is common, pushing vacancy loss to $3,000.
Every day your unit sits empty costs you approximately $67 at $2,000/month rent. That number should motivate every subsequent step in this process.
Make-Ready Costs: $1,000-$2,500
The unit that looked fine with a tenant living in it reveals every imperfection once it's empty. Here's a realistic make-ready budget:
Professional cleaning: $200-$400. Deep clean of kitchen, bathrooms, floors, windows. Not optional — tenants expect a move-in-ready unit.
Paint: $300-$800. Touch-up at minimum, full repaint of high-traffic rooms is common. Interior paint is the single best investment in presenting a clean, fresh unit.
Carpet: $200-$600. Professional cleaning at minimum. If the tenant lived there 3+ years, replacement may be necessary — that's $800-$1,500 for a typical unit.
Minor repairs: $200-$500. Patching wall holes, tightening fixtures, replacing cabinet hardware, fixing sticky doors, caulking bathrooms. The accumulated wear from a tenancy.
Appliance cleaning/repair: $100-$200. Oven, refrigerator, dishwasher — anything the tenant used daily. Replace drip pans, clean coils, check seals.
Total make-ready for a typical single-family rental: $1,000-$2,500. Older properties or longer tenancies skew higher.
Marketing and Leasing: $200-$1,000
Listing the unit requires professional photos ($100-$200), listing fees on rental platforms ($50-$200), and possibly a yard sign and flyers. If you use a leasing agent or pay a tenant-placement fee to a PM, add $1,000-$2,000 — typically one-half to one month's rent.
Self-managing landlords who handle their own leasing save the agent fee but invest the time instead — which brings us to the next category.
Screening Costs: $50-$100
Background checks, credit reports, and application processing for each applicant. If you screen three applicants before finding the right one, that's $90-$150 in direct costs.
Your Time: $500-$1,000
This is the cost self-managing landlords consistently ignore. A typical turnover requires 15-25 hours of your time:
Conducting the move-out inspection and security deposit accounting. Coordinating and supervising the make-ready. Taking photos and creating listings. Fielding inquiries and scheduling showings. Showing the property (multiple times). Reviewing applications and screening tenants. Executing the lease and coordinating move-in.
At any reasonable value for your time — $30, $50, $75/hour — 20 hours of turnover work costs $600-$1,500 in opportunity cost. This time doesn't appear in your accounting, but it's real. It's the hidden labor of landlording concentrated into a 4-6 week sprint.
The Total
Add the categories together:
Vacancy: $1,500-$3,000. Make-ready: $1,000-$2,500. Marketing: $200-$1,000. Screening: $50-$100. Your time: $500-$1,000.
Total: $3,250-$7,600. Midpoint: approximately $4,000.
This is the real cost of a single turnover event. And in summer, when multiple units may turn over simultaneously, the costs multiply and the management bandwidth crisis compounds.
The Retention vs. Replacement Math
Now let's flip the calculation. What does it cost to keep a tenant?
Say your tenant's lease is up in June. Market rents support $2,300/month, and they're currently paying $2,200. You could raise to market — risking a move-out — or offer a renewal at $2,250. The $50/month "discount" costs you $600/year.
If the tenant leaves over that $100/month market-rate increase, you incur $4,000 in turnover costs. To recover $4,000 at $100/month in additional rent, you need the new tenant to stay 3.3 years — and that assumes the new tenant is equally reliable, equally low-maintenance, and equally long-tenured. Three assumptions you have no way to guarantee.
The retention math is almost always in your favor. A modest below-market renewal on a proven good tenant is not leaving money on the table — it's buying insurance against a $4,000 loss. The return on that insurance is 6.7 to 1.
This is the core insight of the lease renewal framework: the best vacancy is the one that never happens.
The Make-Ready Timeline
When a turnover is unavoidable, speed matters. Every day the unit sits empty costs $67 (at $2,000/month). Here's a realistic timeline for a well-executed turnover:
Day 1: Move-out inspection. Assess scope of make-ready work. Begin security deposit accounting.
Days 2-5: Cleaning, minor repairs, and patch work. Order materials for any needed replacements.
Days 5-10: Paint, carpet cleaning or replacement, deeper repairs, appliance work.
Days 10-14: Final cleaning, professional photos, listing goes live.
Days 14-28: Showings, application collection, screening, lease execution.
Days 28-35: Move-in inspection and key handover.
Total: 5 weeks minimum. Optimistic landlords plan for 2 weeks and end up with 6. Realistic landlords plan for 5 and sometimes finish in 4.
The key to compressing this timeline: don't wait for move-out to start planning. Once you know a tenant is leaving, schedule your vendors, order materials, and have the listing template ready. The make-ready should start the day after move-out, not the week after.
The Hidden Multiplier: Simultaneous Turnovers
If you own 10 units and 3 turn over in June — a common scenario since leases often cluster around the same renewal month — you're not dealing with $4,000 in turnover costs. You're dealing with $12,000 hitting your bank account simultaneously plus the management bandwidth of coordinating three make-readies, three leasing processes, and three move-ins in a 4-6 week window.
The financial hit is manageable if you've reserved for it. The time hit is what breaks self-managing landlords. Three vacancies at once means triple the showings, triple the screening, triple the coordination — layered on top of your day job and the rest of your portfolio.
This is why lease staggering matters. If all your leases expire in the same month, you're building in a guaranteed annual crisis. Over time, stagger lease start dates across the calendar so that no more than 20-25% of your portfolio can turn over in any given month.
When Turnover Is the Right Choice
Not every tenant is worth retaining. The math changes when the tenant is creating costs that exceed the cost of turnover.
Chronic late payers — the ones who pay between the 10th and the 15th every month despite a first-of-the-month due date — cost you in follow-up time, late fee enforcement, and cash flow unpredictability. Calculate the annual management cost of chasing their rent.
Property damage patterns — above-normal maintenance requests, repeated fixture damage, evidence of pets in a no-pet unit, excessive wear from overcrowding — erode the property's value over time. Estimate the incremental maintenance cost per year.
If the annual "cost of this tenant" — late payment hassle, extra maintenance, management overhead — exceeds $2,000-$3,000, turnover starts to look like the smarter financial decision. Sometimes the best retention strategy is selective replacement.
Preparing for Summer
You have roughly 10 weeks before peak turnover season. Here's your preparation checklist:
Start renewal conversations now. If any leases expire in June, July, or August and you haven't offered a renewal yet, do it this week. Ninety days of lead time gives you and the tenant room to negotiate. Thirty days feels like an ultimatum.
Line up your vendors. Spring maintenance and summer turnover compete for the same vendors — painters, cleaners, handymen, carpet cleaners. Book them now, before their schedules fill.
Reserve for turnover costs. If you're likely to have one or two turnovers this summer, make sure you have $4,000-$8,000 in reserves earmarked for make-ready and vacancy coverage.
Prep your listing templates. Don't start from scratch when a vacancy hits. Have property photos, descriptions, and screening criteria ready to go. The faster you list, the shorter the vacancy.
The most profitable landlords treat tenant retention as a financial strategy, not a personality trait. It's math, not warmth — and the math overwhelmingly favors keeping good tenants in place.