Hey there —

Here's a number that needs no assumptions at all, which is rare enough to be worth a minute: one vacant month is 8.3% of that unit's annual rent. One twelfth, exactly. It doesn't matter what your rent is, what metro you're in, or what year it is.

That's the floor. It's also the part almost nobody argues with.

The part worth arguing with is what sits on top of it — and how little of that ever reaches your books. A turnover is three costs, and only one of them generates an invoice. The make-ready gets tracked because someone bills you for it. The vacant days and the re-lease costs don't, so they don't.

Run one ordinary turn at the median metro rent — $1,390 a month across the 750 metros carrying rent in our July asking-rent index, or $45.70 a day — and it comes out like this. Make-ready $1,645. Twenty-two vacant days, $1,005. Photos, screening and the leasing fee, $905. Total $3,555, of which the invoice you actually received is 46%.

The other 54% arrived with no paperwork. That's the whole problem: not that operators overspend on turns, but that they only ever see the half that generates a document. I laid out the method here — three receipts and two dates, about twenty minutes, and the number holds for years.

Two things fall out of it that I didn't expect to be as sharp as they are.

The first is that the same bill hurts wildly differently depending on where you own. $3,555 is 2.6 months of gross rent at $1,390. At $1,150 it's over three. Turn costs are close to a national number; rent is the most local number you own, and that mismatch is not small.

The second is subtler. Your occupancy line and your bank statement are measuring different things — one counts empty doors, the other counts missing dollars — and the gap between them is usually bigger than the vacancy itself. A concession, an unpaid balance, an under-market renewal: all real money, none of it ever empties a unit.

So the practical move this week is small. Pull the invoices from your last completed turn, the date rent last hit your account, and the date the new lease started. Subtract. You'll have a number nobody handed you, and you'll use it on every renewal decision you make from here.

You'll also use it the next time someone sends you a scope. A $4,200 turn bill on a unit renting for $1,150 can be completely honest and still be the wrong number — and knowing your own figure is what lets you say so without arguing about the counter.

My question this week: self-manage or property manager — and what did your last turnover actually cost you, all in? Hit reply. I read every one, and I'd genuinely like to see how far apart the real numbers are.

Martin