Apartment Turnover Turn

A turn is the cleaning that happens in the window between one tenant leaving and the next arriving. In property management the word covers the whole make-ready process; for a cleaning company it means the unit has to reach a standard a stranger will inspect on day one.

Why it is deep-clean scope, not recurring scope

A recurring visit maintains a space someone is living in. A turn resets a space to a baseline, and it has to address everything the last tenant’s normal life left behind: inside appliances and cabinets, behind and under anything that moved out, bathroom buildup, interior windows and sills, baseboards, switch plates, vents, and floors edge to edge.

The difference is that nothing gets deferred to next visit. There is no next visit.

The timeline is the hard constraint

Turnover work is scheduled backwards from a move-in date, and that date is usually fixed by a signed lease. It also sits in a queue: paint, repairs, flooring, and final cleaning have to happen in an order, and cleaning generally comes last so it is not undone by the trades ahead of it.

Which means when the trades run late, the cleaning window compresses rather than the move-in moving. Being able to absorb that is most of what a property manager actually needs from a cleaning vendor on turns.

Vacancy cost is why speed matters

Every day a unit sits empty is lost rent, so a turn that takes three days instead of one has a cost well beyond the cleaning invoice. That is the real reason turnover work gets judged on responsiveness as much as on quality.

For property managers running multiple units, we scope turns as recurring capacity rather than one-off bookings — see our property managers page for how that works.