Turnover Cost Calculator

Vacancy loss is lost rent, which accrues every single day the unit sits empty, while hard costs are typically one-time flat expenses. For a $1,400/month unit, 25 vacant days already costs about $1,167 in lost rent before a single cleaning or repair bill is paid — often comparable to or larger than the hard-cost total, and it keeps growing the longer the unit stays vacant.

Hard costs are money spent on physical work to the unit — cleaning, repairs, painting, and flooring. Soft costs are the value of time and marketing spent finding and screening a new tenant — advertising, listing costs, and administrative hours valued at an hourly rate. Both are real costs of turnover, but soft costs are easy to leave out entirely if you're only tracking receipts rather than your own time.

It expresses total turnover cost as a multiple of one month's rent, which makes it easy to compare turnover cost across units with very different rent levels. A turnover costing 1.5 months of rent on a given unit is a useful benchmark for deciding how much incentive (like a modest rent discount or gift card) would be worth offering a good tenant to renew instead of moving out.

It only reduces vacancy loss directly — hard costs (cleaning, repairs, painting, flooring) and soft costs (marketing, admin time) are separate line items that don't automatically shrink just because the unit is re-let faster. But a shorter vacancy period is usually the single biggest lever on the total, since vacancy loss compounds every day the unit sits empty while the other costs are fixed one-time expenses.

Breaking out admin hours and an hourly rate lets you see the real time cost of self-managing a turnover — showings, screening calls, paperwork — separately from out-of-pocket hard costs, which is useful for deciding whether hiring a property manager or leasing agent for that portion of the work would actually save money once your own time is properly valued.