Tenant turnover is the time between lease agreements when one renter moves out and the next renter moves in. During tenant turnover you need find a new tenant, complete any repairs and necessary maintenance for your next renter and schedule a move-in date so you can maximize your rental income.
Want to reduce rental vacancy and boost your income? In this video, Kaycee Miller from Rentec Direct shares expert strategies to streamline the tenant turnover process, keep your rentals occupied, and protect your bottom line.
Whether you’re a landlord, property manager, or real estate investor, this video walks you through the exact steps to make tenant transitions smooth, fast, and profitable.
Discover these tips for navigating tenant turnover like a pro:
- How to plan ahead the moment you receive a move-out notice
- What to inspect (and fix!) before marketing the unit
- Pro tips for scheduling vendors and cleaning crews
- Tools to document property condition
The secret to maximizing rent? Minimizing downtime. This video shows you how.
Tenant Turnover: Minimize Vacancy and Maximize Rent – Watch the Video
Tenant Turnover: Minimize Vacancy and Maximize Rent – Video Transcript
How often are your renters moving out? Dealing with a tenant turnover can take a lot of energy and time, but it’s a reality of owning rental property. According to U.S. Census data, about 40% of renters stay in a property for maybe one to four years. A quarter of them might stay for 12 months or less. And then beyond that, you might be lucky to have a long-term tenant who’s been in a property for 10 years or more. I think our longest term tenant has been about 20 years. To be fair, they lived in one property for 10 years and then they moved to a different property in our portfolio and they’ve been there for about 10 years. But that’s not always going to be the case.
Dealing with tenant turnover is one of those situations where you want to ensure a smooth move out process for your current resident and then you need to prepare the property and get it move-in ready for your next resident.
My name is Kaycee Miller. I work for Rentec Direct property management software. I’m also a landlord, a real estate investor, and I’ve been in the industry for over a decade writing for Rentec Direct, sharing news, tips, and industry updates on the Rentec Direct blog and several other publications throughout the industry.
So today we’re going to talk a little bit about tenant turnover.
Seasonal Trends and Move-Out Timing
Not sure if all of you guys know this, but May is National Moving Month. That means more people move in the month of May. Now this might include rentals, but it’s also people who are buying and selling properties. And some of those cases might be a tenant who was previously renting, but now they’re moving into a property they own, or someone who owned a property and is moving into a rental property.
Regardless, as a real estate investor or a landlord or a property manager, it’s always nice to think about those seasonal trends of when people might be more likely to move in or out of one of those properties and how you can be prepared for tenant turnover.
Basics of Tenant Turnover
So tenant turnover—what are some of the basics? Well, it’s getting that notification from your tenant that they’re going to be vacating a property, whether it comes from you or comes from them. And then really finalizing that date. Okay, what is the date that that property is going to be vacant? That’s where you can begin your tenant turnover process.
And part of that is understanding who your tenant is and your expectation of the condition of the property that they’re going to be leaving. So you can know what kind of vendors, maintenance, cleaning that you need to set up in order to prepare the property for the next resident.
An ideal situation—you would have one tenant leave on one day and even the very next day be able to move someone else in because that means minimal vacancy time and the most rental income that you can collect. But realistically, we tend to plan for about a week, especially if you live in, maybe a college town where a lot of your properties become vacant at once because there are students moving out and moving in. So you gotta kind of plan for all of that tenant turnover.
Move-Out Inspections and Prepping the Property
So you have your move-out date established with your current tenant who’s going to be vacating the property. I think it’s helpful to do a move-out and a move-out inspection where you meet with your renter and you go through and you kind of get an idea of the condition of the property. But then you can also give them tips like, “Hey, this is going to need to be cleaned.” “Oh, I see that there’s a little bit of damage there. If you want to patch it yourself, you can do that.”
And then that gives you an idea of the condition of the property, what vendors you need to set up, what kind of work is going to need to be done, and then you can kind of get that realistic date for when the next tenant could potentially move in.
And it gives that current tenant the opportunity to get the majority of their deposit back if they know what kind of condition they need to leave the property.
Encouraging Cleanliness and Smart Planning
I once lived in an apartment complex where they gave tenants vacating the option to hire a cleaning company before they actually moved out. They could say like, “Hey, if you want to use this cleaning company, you can use a hundred dollars of your deposit for it.” And so that was kind of a cool option because if you didn’t use that cleaning company and you moved out and the cleaning company still needed to come in, they would charge you a little bit more for it. I think because they weren’t able to like pre-plan and schedule the cleaning. There was more like, “Okay, we need to come in and do the inspection and then schedule the cleaning.”
So it just took a little bit more time, which is why they wanted to incentivize vacating tenants to use the cleaning company so they were more likely to just be able to plan for it and they could pre-schedule it.
So I like to think about, “Oh, I’m already going to have to get this cleaned. If I can get the tenant to just agree to it, then we can get this pre-idea.” But a lot of people like to go through and try and earn as much of their deposit back. So giving them that opportunity is a great idea as a landlord or property manager.
Move-In Readiness and Property Condition
Now, once a tenant has vacated the property, that’s when you really should go through and make sure that property is move-in ready. Remember, the condition that you provide your property to the next tenant is that baseline condition for what the next lease will start.
So if there’s anything broken, if the things aren’t clean, if there’s damage on the walls, then the new lease would essentially take that on as their starting baseline and then it’s going to be harder to maybe deduct in the future, especially if you don’t have good records.
So I like to use a company called zInspector. It’s a really helpful inspection app that connects right into your property management software. We do have that integration with Rentec Direct, but zInspector lets both your tenants and you walk around a property, take pictures of the condition that you can use as a move-out checklist. And then again, it’s a move-in checklist or you can use it to connect with your vendor team and your maintenance team to be like, “Okay, this needs to be patched.” So it’s just a really quick way to take videos or pictures and then connect work orders to it to help with that tenant turnover.
Marketing the Property and Finding the Next Tenant
Next, with tenant turnover, you’re going to need to be thinking about how do we get—who’s the next person who’s going to move into this property?
So have you already gone through the listing, the property marketing, the property vetting rental applications, and approving your next tenant? This is all stuff that can happen before the previous resident moves out. So as soon as you get that notice—maybe it’s the 30-day notice, maybe you have a 90-day notice depending on your state laws—then you can start the marketing, the property and moving forward to hopefully get someone approved and ready to move in as soon as that property is move-in ready after the previous tenant moves out.
Setting the Tone for New Tenants
Also with your tenant turnover process, think about how can you set up the relationship with the next tenant in the most positive way to really set a great groundwork for maintaining good communication, establishing a lease-abiding relationship, and maybe someone who really likes to maintain a property well.
That’s why I always like to bring a property up to the highest standards when a new tenant moves in because it sets the tone of “this is how clean it is,” “this is how well maintained it is,” “I expect you as my tenant to maintain it and keep it as clean at that same level.”
Different personalities might not be able to accomplish it up to my standards, but I still think it’s a good idea to set those standards at the beginning of a lease term.
Final Thoughts on Tenant Turnover
Those are some of the things I like to think about when it comes to tenant turnover and preparing a property from one tenant to the next. Really maintaining a good routine and process for your tenant turnover can be one of the best ways to keep your property occupied as quickly as possible so you can keep collecting that rent. And it can minimize that reduction of rental income when it’s not occupied because you’re dealing with ongoing maintenance or trying to find a tenant too because you didn’t take advantage of pre-thinking about all that planning you could do as soon as you get that intent to vacate notice.
My name is Kaycee Miller. I work for Rentec Direct property management software. I’m also a landlord and a real estate investor, and I write about all of this, these tips on the Rentec Direct blog. Come and visit me there and make sure to like and subscribe for more videos about property management and being a landlord in the US.