How to Cut Churn with a Great Move-Out Process | Property Management Systems Conference 2026

All right, well, thanks everybody. Excited to get into some details on our move-out process and talk a little bit about some changes that we made over the last year and the impact that it had on my management company. So before we jump into that, I want to let you know that this presentation has been declared safe from AI content. You may be in a little bit of AI overload from the week or honestly from the last 2 years. And there's a lot of really interesting things happening with AI, but I'm not gonna be talking about any of those things. Today I'm gonna be talking about basic blocking and tackling of property management. We're not gonna be discussing AI at all, so you can give your brain a rest from having to think about that for at least the next hour-ish. And if you can't really see this, 'cause I know the lighting's a little off in here, this says vendors talking about AI, and this is me just trying to run my PM company. So if you don't know who I am, I have a background in engineering. So my degree is actually in electrical engineering, and I worked for 5 years as a control systems engineer right out of college. During that time, my business partner and I started buying rental properties. So this is in Columbus, Ohio, and we still own a lot of those properties, but we fell in love with rental properties and property management during that time. So in 2013, I quit my engineering job and started RL Property Management. And today that company manages about 720 doors, and we have about 35 people who work there. And it's a lot of fun. We manage rental homes and apartments all over Central Ohio. We try and stay in our lane, so we actually don't do brokerage. We don't do HOA. We say no to a lot of things so that we can say yes to our ideal prospects and customers. And I also care a lot about details with my engineering background. I love data, I love analysis and that type of thing. And you're going to see that theme throughout the talk today. A few years ago, I kind of poked my head above water after a decade of grinding and growing the management company and started to participate more broadly in the property management industry and community. And some of you may be familiar with my podcast or my newsletter, which I really enjoy creating. And I do a little bit of speaking like this, and it's been some of the most rewarding work of my life. I actually enjoy this type of thing even more than running the management company. And so it's really fun to collaborate and share what's been working, what's not working, and get feedback from people like you. One of the things we do at my management company is, as I mentioned, we're very data-driven. So we keep score and we share that score transparently with prospects and customers. So if you go on our website, you'll see this scorecard. This is a screenshot ripped right from our website a few days ago. This is data from December, the month of December. For RL Property Management. We're sharing with anyone who wants to see it things like our median days on market, our median time to turn, lease renewal rate, occupancy rate, average rent, median repair days, and some other data. And I really enjoy tracking and sharing this data for a couple reasons. One, when you're talking with a prospective customer, the ability to share this type of data really inspires trust. It helps them understand that You're not hiding anything, and you are also the type of company that is keeping an eye on these things. And so because we share this data, there's no other management company in my market that shares data in this way, in a public way. So I think it really helps set us apart and helps us stand out from our competitors in Columbus. The other reason I really like doing it is, believe it or not, most of this data is not easy to pull out of your property management software. And because of that, you end up having to do kind of some work and pull some reports and mess around with Google Sheets just to get this data together and display it. But I think that's a very healthy motion for your company to develop. If you can get in the habit of pulling some of these KPIs and looking at them on a regular cadence, you're naturally going to start to pay more attention to them and start to notice when they aren't looking as good as they should, and then you can take action. But if you're not collecting this data and looking at it on a regular cadence, you would never know. And unfortunately, the management softwares that we all use just don't surface most of this type of business-level data in any reasonable form or fashion. I wish they would. I've spoken to all of them about it. I've asked, I've begged, I've pleaded, and for some reason, some of these basics, uh, just are not displayed anywhere on any dashboard, and you end up having to, like I said, pull reports and stuff like that. So by the way, this is very informal, so if you have questions along the way, please interrupt. There'll be a lot of discussion if this is anything like the last two sessions. Yep, well, median days on market, we actually have an Airtable where we track all of our turns and our listings. And so as soon as the property gets listed, we enter that date in an Airtable database. And then when it gets leased, we have that date. And so that's where that data comes from. Same thing with time to turn from that same database. Lease renewal rate, that actually is data pulled from our LeadSimple processes. Occupancy rate comes from Buildium, although The thing that's annoying about Buildium is, and I don't know if AppFolio's or Rentvine is the same way, but if a property's already leased but it's currently vacant, that still counts against your occupancy rate. So it depends how you think about that. Average rent, we have to do an export of the rent roll from Buildium. Median repair days, we get that from PropertyMeld. Percent of rent collected by the 5th, that's a manual export of rent roll or some other report from Buildium. And resident satisfaction, that's another PropertyMeld data point. Mhm.

You said you, you're getting the—

yeah, that's only maintenance, correct? That is correct. Yep. We do separately track, uh, we do NPS surveys every 3 to 4 months, so we actually separately have an NPS score for our residents.

How do you get that?

What program are you using?

We use Retently, is what it's called. Yep. Somebody over here.

Oh, I was just going to comment because we've been struggling. So we do the same on mail, the resident satisfaction score, but that can be easily flawed month to month based upon the number of actual reviews you're getting. Are you, are you keeping track that as like a secondary tool? So like if you only got 10 feedback versus 100 month to month? I know it's a huge extreme, but number can easily be swayed by the number of data points.

Well, I think we have enough volume that it doesn't jump around that much. And you could always, if you had to, you could pull it like weekly and then look at like the trailing 60-day average if it, if you, if it was jumping around too much like that. Yeah.

And who's—

I don't know. Someone on my team does.

But it's one person that's responsible for compiling all the data, even though those KPIs are separate departments?

Correct. Yeah, and my guess is Andrew, who does our website, he's the one that updates this on the actual website every month. So he probably has a Google Sheet that he has multiple people enter data into, and then he pulls it all together, I think. Yeah. Okay, so let's kind of get back to the problem that we were having and why I'm giving this talk. So what was happening is when a tenant would move out, we would prepare a detailed turn scope and estimate like all of you do every time a tenant moves out., and then we would send it to the owner for approval, and then that would start what became a very contentious and stressful few weeks where we're talking with the owner about the turn. They don't like the price, they don't agree with the scope, they've got a guy, they want to get in there and see it, they want to get their guy to give a price, and there would be all this back and forth. Of course, not with every owner, but with a lot of owners, and especially with how much maintenance and repair costs have increased since COVID And PropertyMed has some great data on that. It's up a lot. A lot of these owners had not done a turn in a long time. And so they didn't understand that the prices we were quoting were not highway robbery. They were the market rate for that work in 2025. You know, and this was stressful, right? And during this whole time, I would always tell my team, when a property owner has a vacancy, that property owner is not the same person that you know. They're a different person. The property owner that you are used to dealing with, who's kind of calm and rational and you can have a conversation with, the moment the tenant moves out, that person is gone and a different person is who you're now dealing with. And that person is scared, irrational, emotional, and confused. And trying to have complicated financial modeling discussions or detailed turn scope estimate discussions with that person is difficult because the whole time you're talking to them, all they can think about is, how am I going to make my next 2 mortgage payments because there's no more rent coming in? So not ideal. And of course, many of those owners would decide to sell. How many of you had a bunch of owners last year sell when they had a vacancy? Yeah, most people. So, and that's terrible, right? You've spent all this money to acquire this customer, you've onboarded the property, you've had 1 or 2 cycles with tenants, you've got it, it's all in your systems and everything, and now they decide to sell. To make matters worse, we don't even do brokerage, so we were not capturing that commission on the way out the door. It was just revenue that was ripped from our company and never came back. So really not good, and it was drastically impacting our churn. And this meme says, "You excited about the hot housing market?" And the little boy says, "I'm in property management." And then he has to be coddled and cuddled because a hot housing market is not great for property managers. Property management is really countercyclical. So during a hot housing market, we lose units. We typically will net lose units because owners decide to sell. And when the market, when the housing market is depressed, then property owners can't sell and they call us. So how many people over the last 6 months or so had a big increase in property owners saying, "Hey, I couldn't sell my property and I want to try to rent it out with you guys"? Yeah, most people. We have too. So that's really what prompted me to dig into this. So to summarize, owners were surprised by the make-ready cost, and we were catching them at a really vulnerable moment. This caused them to have a really strong emotional reaction to that discussion and to that problem of a vacancy, and they were churning out. So, and even when the owners didn't churn out, they would take forever to come to agreement with us on the turn scope and the turn price. And now you have to send a funding request and wait for that money to come. That can take a few days. And even if you were successful here and you got the owner to agree and you got their money and you did the turn and you found the tenant, when it was all said and done, the owner's looking back at the whole thing and they're like, why did you guys take 10 weeks to fill my vacancy? And you're thinking, well, 4 of those weeks were you messing around arguing with me and not sending in the money. But they don't remember that. All they remember is the 12-week vacancy and they blame it on you. So it just, it really was not good. To make matters worse, a lot of this is happening during your busiest time of the year. You know, April, May, June, July, August, we are running around like crazy. We're stressed out. We don't have time for these irrational owners. And so you're adding stress and workload to a time when you're least able to handle that. So yes, I'm sorry for the things I said during busy season. So here's what we did. So we took a careful look at this and we decided to do something totally different. Now some of you are already doing pieces and parts of this. I don't claim to have invented what I'm about to talk about, but it was something we avoided for a long time, and it all starts with a pre-move-out inspection. What that means is we're going to the property as soon as it becomes vacant, and we're preparing a turn scope and estimate. And we're sending that to the owner. Now, that's something I had run into people at conferences and heard them talk about going back years, but I had always resisted doing this for a few reasons. One, I was concerned about how you could come up with an accurate scope when the unit was still occupied, right? I mean, what about holes behind the dresser? You know, what about destroyed wood flooring under a carpet? What about all the damage that could happen over the next 30 days prior to move out or while they're moving furniture out? What if they leave a bunch of junk in the property? So I always felt like as an engineer, I can't accurately assess what the turn cost is going to be until they're out of there. So I'm not even going to try. That was my thinking. And I also worried that getting in there while the tenant was still there, the tenant would try and talk to us about security deposit stuff. And I just didn't want to get into like a dispute with the tenant before they've even moved out about some hypothetical security deposit deduction. So we just never did it. But it turns out that there's a lot of advantages to doing this, which I'm going to go into detail what those are, and they far outweigh, for us anyway, the disadvantages. And everything in life is trade-offs. I think you all intuitively understand that. So it's just a, what is the set of problems or challenges that you can solve and what are you going to get in exchange for solving those things? There's no perfect solution. But sometimes there's a certain set of trade-offs and solutions that work better than others. I can, yeah, if you email me or message me, I'll send them. So short side quest to talk about churn. I'm obsessed with churn, and you— what you see here on the screen is a graph of our client churn over the last like 2.5 years, and it's what— the number that you're seeing here is the monthly churn. So monthly churn was as low as like around 1% over here, and it peaked at over 3% up here, which was in like October, November of 2024. Starting around this time, we implemented the process I'm going to describe along with a few other changes that we made, and that dropped our client churn from a high of 3.3% down to 1.0%. And the way you— the way to think about this, because we're used to talking about churn in terms of annual churn, like the benchmarking reports that Profit Coach does talk about annual churn. So to convert from monthly to annual, you would just multiply by 12. So 3.3% monthly churn, that's a 37% annual client churn. So if you started the year with 100 clients, that would mean 37 of them left during that calendar year. Not great. The other thing to understand about churn, is it on the next slide? Yeah. I really like to track unit churn and client churn. Separately. Unit churn is how many units you're churning out every year, and client churn is how many clients. And they, they'll be slightly different, especially if you manage a lot, if you have a lot of multi-unit owners, whether that's multifamily or even if you have owners who have multiple single-family homes. If that's your property management company, your unit and client churn can be quite different. If all of your owners just have like one unit, then they're almost the same. And just to talk a little bit about how I calculate churn, the way I like to do this is I like to track it monthly. What I do is I record in a Google Sheet. Again, property management softwares aren't tracking this for us for whatever reason, despite me asking for like 10 years. So every month you record how many units did I start this month with and how many clients did I start this month with. Then once the month is over, you record how many units did I lose and how many clients did I lose, and you divide the latter number into the former. That gives you your churn rate. So if you started January with 100 clients and 200 units and you lost 1 client and 2 units, that would be a 1% unit churn rate and a 1% client churn rate. And then you would start over for the next month. You would record the number of units you started the month with, the number of clients you started the month with, and do it again. Once you do that, you're gonna end up with like a bunch of rows in the spreadsheet. To get your annual churn, you can sum up all of those monthly churn numbers. So if you have 1.3% and 2.2% and 1.9% for your monthlies, you just add those all together over the last trailing 12 months. That gives you your annual churn. That's the most conservative way that I know of to calculate churn. There's a few other ways you can do it that will usually give you a lower number actually, but I like to do it this way cuz it's the most kind of brutal and real for what your company is experiencing. So last thing about churn is that here's how I think about unit churn and client churn differently. For us, we have about 720 doors but only about 380 owners, so we're close to like 2 doors per owner on average. Client churn is useful for understanding your company's operational and customer service performance. Because owners decide to leave your company, not doors. So if you want to understand, are we doing a great job for our owners? What's their perception of our performance? How's our customer service? How's our leasing team doing? How's our turn team doing? How's our accounting team doing? Look at your client churn. If you want to understand your financial position, and especially if you're trying to do financial forecasting, you want to look at unit churn. Because you get paid by the unit, not by the owner. And so unit, if you know your unit churn, you can forecast that out and you can get a really clear picture of how many doors you're gonna have in any given month. And if you subscribe to my newsletter, I sent out last Friday a really cool tool that I built that visualizes your unit churn for you. So if you enter in the number of doors you're adding per month, your unit churn, and your current door count, it projects out your growth, and it will tell you how quickly you're growing and where you're going to max out at in growth. Because the unfortunate thing about churn is that it scales with your growth. So if you have, you know, 15% unit churn per year, the bigger your company gets, the more units 15% represents, right? And your growth does not scale that way. So if you're adding 20 doors per month at 200 doors, If you make no other changes, you're still going to only be adding 20 doors per month when you're at 400 units. And so eventually your churn catches up to your growth and then you're stagnant. It's easier to visualize everything I just described, which is why I made that tool. Check that out. Last thing about churn, small changes have big impacts. So if you are looking at your unit churn and you're able to decrease your unit churn from 20% to 15%, You might think, oh, that's like only a 5% change, so maybe I get like 5% more profit or 5% more revenue or something. But it's actually a 33% increase in the average unit lifetime value, like the number of months or years that you're— that the unit stays with your company on average. That is a huge, huge change because remember, you've paid to acquire that unit. So an extra year and a half or almost 2 years that you manage that unit on the tail end that's like almost pure profit because you've already paid your sales and marketing costs and a lot of the other, you know, fixed costs associated with management. Peter? Yeah?

What's the LTV on that difference between 5% and 6.6%?

It's 33%. What do you mean?

Well, like the delta in like profit or gross margin.

Oh, I haven't, but My intuition has always been that the first year you're managing a property, you're break-even. So if you use that, you're going from like 4 to 5.5 years of profit. So it's even more than a 33% increase in profit. My guess is like any, any unit you've been managing for like 2 to 3 years, it's so baked into your company's DNA by then. It's so like You've turned it once or twice, your tenants are in there, it's, you have it in Meld, you have it in your softwares, like your team is familiar with it, it's easy to manage, right? It's the new units that are hard to manage. That's where all the time and stress goes. The owner knows your systems by now. They've gotten all their questions about your owner statements out of the way. So you really want to retain those units. You know, it's very important. Yeah, yeah, is that— I mean, is it relevant, or do you just say, hey, yeah, we do track that. Um, we have a few categories, you know, that we'll categorize when somebody churns out, and we track that. It is marginally useful. What I've seen though is that when an owner decides to terminate management services for whatever reason, like they may say, "Oh, I need to sell the property," but that might just be because they're not having a great experience with you and they're ready to be done with the whole thing. And like that same owner, had they had a better experience or a better occupancy or some other factor, they may have stuck it out. Mark talks a lot about it's our job to help owners deal with the psychological challenges of owning rental properties and build their stamina to become long-term investors where the real money is. And if we're not doing a good job of that, they may decide to sell. And you don't necessarily want your team to be like, well, they decided to sell, so not our fault, nothing we can do about that. In my experience, that's not always the case. Sometimes, of course, it is. Sometimes, like, they're gonna move back into the property, or their sister or something. But other times, there's a chance we could have kept the account. Okay, back to our new move-out process. We took our little churn detour. So the new process is as soon as the tenant gives notice to vacate, that is now our trigger to start this move-out process. And prior to making this change, we really didn't do anything until we had possession of the property, keys in hand. And this is like the new trigger for us and is the linchpin to the whole new process. So when we do get, when we do get move-out notice from the tenant, two things are going to happen at once. The first thing is we're going to prepare a market rent analysis for that property as if it was a brand new unit for us. We're going to look to see what is the rent we could get for this unit today in the rental market, ignoring what it's currently renting for because we know that tenant is moving out. Hopefully that number is higher than the current rent that they're paying. The other thing we're going to do is this pre-move-out inspection that I talked about. We're going to go to the property, we're going to do a full inspection and prepare our turnkey open estimate, and that Turn scope, of course, is not going to be 100% like I talked about. There's stuff everywhere. We don't know any damage that could happen prior, you know, between now and when they actually move out. So it's not going to be perfect, but what we can do is include like a fudge factor. So we can include what we— I think we normally include like a 20% contingency when we prepare that turn scope and estimate, and we explain that to the owner of why that is, which I'll go into detail in a second. We use a company called RentCast to do our market rent analysis. I've played around with a few of these different tools. They all come back with these like slick PDFs that you can send to your owners. Some of them are kind of expensive. We have found our team really, they like RentCast. The reports look really good. They're extremely affordable and fast. And so we use these in conjunction with some of our own internal data to prepare these market rent analysis reports, both for new owners, like prospective owners, as well as our existing owners in this case. Okay, so the most important part of this, of course, is creating this turn scope. So we're going to do a complete inspection, and when it's ready, we're going to call the owner. What I don't want you to do is email this report to the owner. And the next slide has a little thing I tweeted about, tweeted out about like managing Gen Z employees. It's like they really don't like getting on the phone. In fact, a lot of millennials don't even like getting on the phone. I'm a millennial. But you need to get on the phone. This is not an email situation. And so when you do call that owner, here's how we have found to make these conversations really successful. We get on the phone and say, "Hey, Mr. Owner, great news. We just completed a market rent analysis for your property because your tenant gave notice to vacate, and we're gonna be able to get you some more rent. The rent is actually gonna go up, and here's the new rent that we're gonna be able to get at your property." So you start out the conversation with the good news. What's gonna be possible? You're getting them in that forward mindset and you're trying to zoom them out from what we all know they like to do when you send them the turn scope is scroll all the way to the bottom and look at the price, right? That's our favorite thing to do. And we want to head that off. We want to start by zooming them out and getting them thinking big picture. Oh wow, I'm going to get a rent increase. That's great. That's going to help pay for some of this turn costs. That's going to make my ROI better. And it's a better place for their brain to be at. And remember, When you're calling this owner, the tenant is still there. So that same old owner that you've known is still home, and you can talk to that person. You're not talking to the person who has a vacancy yet. So then you go over the estimated turn cost with them, and you can also give them a projected turn completion date. Because remember, the turn is still months away, so you have time. You have time to plan, you have time to get your contractors lined up, you have time to work out your scheduling. So that you're able to really give them like a firm date. Like, okay, tenant's probably gonna vacate on this day, assuming we get possession. We think we can have the turn ready by this day. The property will be listed and marketed, and our average, you know, days on market is only 11 days. So you should have a signed lease in hand by this date. That is a much more powerful conversation than just sending them the turn scope and hoping they're not mad. Yeah.

In that state, in that conversation right there, so I'm your owner and you're calling.

That's a great question. So we will break out on our turn scope and estimate which items are tenant responsibility. It's hard to get into that level of detail at this stage because the tenant hasn't even moved out yet. They could in theory fix some of those things, or there could be— there's definitely going to be more. So we try not to get down in the weeds too much with that. We just tell them like, hey, of course, any items that we find are tenant responsibility. You're not gonna be responsible for that cost. We're gonna withhold the security deposit. The other thing about that discussion though is, I think most of you probably know, you can't charge the full replacement cost for almost anything at a rental property. So even if the carpet was only 2 years old and the tenant trashed it, And it costs like $5,000 for all new carpeting through the whole house. You can't charge the tenant $5,000. You have to— there's some HUD form that shows the useful life of the different components. What's carpet? Does anyone know? 5 years. So if they were there 2 out of the 5 years, you can only charge them for 3 of the 5, the 3 years remaining useful life. So 3/5 times the cost of the new carpet. And, you know, you got to have that conversation with owners too.

For some clarification on that, you— this scope and estimate creation, are you putting everything on there including no tenant charges? It's a whole, and you—

I don't have an example pulled up here. I'm not sure though. I'm not sure if we do break it out at this stage or not. Yeah. I shouldn't have to pay for this. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, and when the tenant does eventually move out, of course we go back and make any adjustments needed. When our team goes there to start the turn, they take another look at the scope, and if there's any major items that were missed, they're gonna call that into the office and talk to the owner.

We don't have even 10 minutes.

No, don't, don't give them that. Yeah, don't even give them 10 minutes. Best thing to do is email as they pick up the phone. I just sent you an email. I want to call you right away. Like, if you want, you can pull it up and I'm gonna walk you through it, right? Yeah.

To, of course, get possession of the property. Review if we have— they know that it's not the final amount. They know that the resident may have or may not have charges, but that helps a lot. Just put in like the estimate, estimate for this, for that.

Maybe put that word like 100 times. Estimate, estimate, estimate.

Yeah, we do. On every line.

Yeah.

Yeah. Are you doing these in ZInspector?

We don't. We are looking at ZInspector right now, but we up till now have just been using some big JotForm that we developed. And I think like Google Sheets. Yeah.

So it makes it more efficient on—

Totally. Do you do in-house maintenance? We do have in-house maintenance. Did you have a question? Well, in Columbus, Ohio, I'm sure we have had flat rents. I don't know that we've ever had it go down, but typically, the typical vacancy is that the tenant's been there for several years, so normally we are able to at least get a nominal increase in Columbus. Yeah, it's a much harder conversation if it's down, which Like Austin, there's probably a few cities where that's true. Yeah. I don't think so because we don't— tenants don't like a bunch of pictures while their stuff is there. So we're normally doing that full photo session after move out for the security deposit and everything. So yeah, I don't think we have photos at this stage. Yeah. So I'm going to give one other thing that works really well with this process, and it has to do with property improvements. So because we have a bunch of time, it's a great opportunity to propose to your property owner larger improvements and renovations to their property because you're going to have time to order parts and materials and line up contractors and even general contractors. You can be, you know, as you complete your walkthrough, take a look at, hey, what about these bathrooms? What about the kitchen? Is there any major renovations we could do? And what's going to be the impact on the rents we can charge if we do that? So as part of this conversation with the owner, you can say, hey, Mr. Owner, let me give you something else. I ran the numbers, we could renovate your kitchen for $12,000. And if we did that, I think we can get another $150 a month in rent. On this property. And if we do that, here's a slick graphic showing the ROI on that investment and the impact on your cap rate and your, you know, market value for the home and all these other things that, you know, you hear a lot of discussion about asset management, that this is you functioning more like an asset manager and guiding them to making better financial decisions and helping them again zoom out from just that turn cost and understand over the next 10 years what's the financial impact of investing $12,000 today. You know, an extra $150 a month in rent over 12 years, and especially if you're looking at like the property value as well, it could make a really significant difference to their, um, to the performance of their investment. So yeah, obviously Have you thought about or— I don't think we have, but I think that's a great idea. Yeah, we tend to go through these different contractors a lot. I would say, yeah, if you have a great team that you trust— remember, the tenant's still there, so they may not necessarily want you traipsing a bunch of contractors through. They're used to your team, at least for us, our team is in there doing quarterly inspections. So they're really used to us being there, but yeah, if you can swing it, I think that's great.

If you were to—

We, it would just be our standard markup on maintenance, or like if we did in-house. There's a line that goes with that. Yeah. That's a great question. I don't think we're capturing that revenue the way we could be. That's a good point. So once you have this great conversation with the owner about the turn and potential improvements, at that point you now have at least a month probably till move out. And so you can either request funds from the owner and they can kind of take their time gathering their funds from wherever they need to. Or one thing that we've been doing recently is giving the owner the option like, hey, why don't you let us withhold your next couple disbursements till the move out? And that way we'll start, we'll get most of the money or all of the money that we need for your turn. And you'll have to send less money or even no money, you know, to fund it. And so owners like this, you know, there's that loss aversion where like money that you get to keep is less rewarding than money that you lose, even if it's like the same dollar amount. So them not having to send money back to us is very advantageous sort of from a psychological standpoint. And so once this is all done and you get their agreement either way, you are now ready to plan your turn. And so when the tenant moves out, you are completely ready to go. You will have a fully approved turn— a fully approved turn scope, funding in hand, your contractor scheduled, your new rent price already confirmed, and the turn completion deadline already agreed upon so the owner knows what to expect. And this is a lot different than what we were dealing with before when a tenant would move out and we would just call the owner or email them. So the result is no more last-minute scrambling, and it's just, it's so much smoother. So this has really been helpful for us.

You do your pre-move out, you know, I send Steve, our contractor, the scope that, you know, I know that his, his portion will be. Any advice for you then get in there once it's— he's scheduled to go in, let's say, the day after you get keys. So then I get in there and do my thing, and I have concern that it turns into what my contractor doesn't like, which is, hey, while you're there, I need you to do this, this, and this. Hey, I know you're scheduled already for this, but I need you to do this, this, and this. Any kind of advice? Maybe it's a null point because maybe it doesn't happen that often, but any advice?

Well, I think it happens a lot. It's normal, actually. It's interesting that your contractor doesn't like that because theoretically that's more money for him or her.

He doesn't like it from like a schedule standpoint.

Yeah, I would probably just tell that vendor to expect an extra day of work on these. Yeah, or add 20% or whatever. That's a good point. I mean, especially if they're not your employees, they do have like other jobs lined up and everything, so they're sensitive to those things. The other thing which I forgot to talk about is when you call your owners to explain all of this, they, you know, this is obviously, I advantageous for us as the property manager, but the property owner doesn't really care about that. They don't care about it being easier for us. They want to know what's in it for them. And when you start explaining like there could be additional charges, like we have a 20% contingency, like we don't really, really know like all the security deposit deductions, the owner's thinking like, well, this doesn't sound like a great thing at all. Why are we doing it this way? So the way to explain it to owners is you're going to have a shorter term. Like, that's money in the bank. And you can help them do the math on, hey, owners who engage with us in this process have a 5-day shorter turn on average. At your rent, at your property, that's an extra X hundred dollars right in your, in your bank account. And it's, you know, every day a unit is vacant is a risk. It's a risk on a break-in. If you're in Ohio, it's a risk for frozen and burst water pipes. It's another day lost on the rental market. So time is of the essence with these vacancies. And so explaining it to your owner in a way that shows, that tells them what's in it for them is going to help that really go well.

So you have in-house team is out, got to get that estimate, right? So is your in-house tech going with them so that you, or do they have to schedule yet another visit?

We only make one visit while it's occupied, and the person who does that takes— no, they don't take pictures, but they prepare like a detailed— I think it's a JOT form that we use, and we use that to prepare the estimate. So there's no separate trip. The challenge of like, how do you get an accurate number is really important, and it's important for normal turns as well. So I would say like whatever your process is for normal turns, you're going to be doing that same motion. Like however you're coming up with estimates for turns, do that same thing, just move it up. Yeah, I just think I would just bring that dude through then. That's what I was— Yeah, with your team at the same time. Okay, so final thoughts here. This is a lot of work to change it, to change your process here, but what you're doing when you do this is you're taking a time-constrained set of activities and you're pulling them forward in time to a time period that is not time constrained. In other words, while this unit is occupied, it doesn't matter if it takes you a few days to get to the property to do the move inspection because the tenant was on vacation. It doesn't matter if your team takes a week to prepare the scope and estimate. It doesn't matter if the owner's on vacation when you have the turn scope and estimate ready. It doesn't matter if the owner takes 2 weeks to send the money. You've now removed time as a constraint for the most part from that set of activities because you have 60 days or whatever leading up to the move out. Whereas when you do it the other way, the normal way, all of those things are like super time constrained and every day delay is impacting your total vacancy time. So this is a way of taking a busy set of activity, a busy time, and moving, pulling forward a bunch of those activities to a less busy time. So it's streamlining work. This process also delivers to your company a calm and rational property owner with which to have a discussion about a turn. And that is huge, and it's gonna make your team much happier, and it's gonna let you have productive discussions with your property owners about things like property improvements, turn costs, security deposit, and everything else. Yeah, last meme of the presentation. Being a property manager isn't stressful at all. Marcus, 27 years old. Uh, any questions? Yeah, so I don't know that we really tell tenants like they're used to us being in there for these quarterly inspections. So to them, they're just like, oh, this is just another inspection. So they're not really poised to have those discussions. We also, when they move in, we give them a bunch of details about the move-out process and security deposit deductions. I think we even give them a checklist of things they need to do and charges, like common charges for things that are left behind. So if they do, did have questions, we're just going to refer them to that set of documents and be like, Yeah, we'll be in touch with you after move out, but the property needs to be in same condition when you moved in, and here's a list of common charges. Like to do this? Well, I think we do combine it with the last quarterly inspection. Yeah, I think that is what we do.

I mean, you showed us the churn numbers. Like, what makes you feel like there's a—

Yeah, and just talking to my team about how it's been going. It was, you know, it was a bit of a sales effort to get my team on board with this. Yeah, there's a little bit more, there's like one extra trip to the property, and there's, there could be like a little bit of stress on the team that prepares the turn scope and estimate because they're having to explain to the owner like these extra charges and stuff like that. So yeah. Like I said, it's all tradeoffs, right? So it's what are the tradeoffs do you want that you're willing to accept? Yeah, we don't. I know a lot of people do do that. We've tried it, but yeah, we've tried pre-leasing, we've tried pre-listing where we just list the unit, but we don't do tours. And for us in our market, it just never seemed to move the needle for us. Tenants hated pre-leasing, owners would get confused. It was also like, if you list it before the tenant moves out, then when the tenant does move out, do you take down the listing? I don't know, I never could get it really working well, but I know in every session that I've done with this, there's a few people who figured out pre-leasing, or it's really common in their market. And so, does anyone here consistently pre-lease every unit before, Okay, so you two, you three, we pre-list based on—

but you have those homes where— because we, in the first year of a tenancy, we do two formal inspections and then annual every year after that. So you know the homes that are like, hey, it's not going to be some major turn. And so we will pre-list with a very safe available date.

Yeah.

And then I will adjust the available state once I see it. Because we know the properties where you're like, "That's a good tenant. They always tell us if something's wrong. Their last inspection was great." Or the ones—

So is there anyone here who consistently has a new lease signed prior to the tenant moving out, like the majority of the time? 60%? Is it like half though?

Is it—

definitely gets the least water.

Okay, so for you two who are consistently doing this, how long do you leave from move out to move in? 2 weeks?

It's case by case. It depends on the last inspection, so we can pretty much gauge. And the owner side of it's huge. We have some owners who are just a pain, but that goes back into can you do this up front? Are they going to give you the money? We do a hybrid version of this. So we're asking them 60 days out to— we want to hold $5,000 in reserves if it's a mess and we know we need a full paint, we know we need carpet. I will say pretty much never do they let us hold that money. We do it anyways and they have to opt out. So we say, hey, we're— they're moving out in 60 days, we're going to go ahead and raise reserves to $5,000. And, but the property manager knows, so if it's a smaller term, she'll do $2,000, something like that.

Yeah.

But I will say they almost always say, do not hold my money. I will fund it with a credit card or something else when it's time.

Okay. Yeah, we have mixed results there.

At least they're prepared for it. They know we're going to come after them for the money.

Yeah, there was somebody in my first session who only left 5 days. Between move-out and move-in. And that blows me away. I mean, you know, our average vacancy from move-out to move-in is probably 6 weeks. Like, even if we're—

so to answer your question, it's about 10 days for an easy turn.

Okay, so 10 days. Yeah. And I'm always impressed by anyone who can do that because that requires lining up a lot of resources and handling contingencies. It's— I'd love to attend a session on executing like 5-day maintenance team, it's a lot easier.

So if I know my team's doing it, I mean, I can— yeah, so I would do that turn first before the other ones that don't have a tenant moving in.

Yep.

But definitely a 10-day, probably more like a 14-day, but we'll tighten it up once we know more.

What is your, uh, notice to vacate requirement? How many days? Like, how, how compressed is this whole process?

So we, I believe our lease now requires 60 days, and we're gonna start reaching out around 90 days to discuss renewal. So at that 90-day mark, it fires a LeadSimple automation that emails the tenant and says, hey, your lease is coming up in 90 days. Are you interested in renewing? Yes or no? And if they say no, then we send them the mo— like the we send them to a form where they submit their notice to vacate. Yeah, so we're typically getting it pretty far ahead. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, we require move-out notice to be given through a standard form. Yeah. And actually, if you just go to— if you just pull up my newsletter, it's the most— it's like the second most recent published issue. So it should be on, on my, like, my little newsletter subsite and you can click through. It's free.

If you know your days on market, you know how fast you're renting them. That is key.

Yep.

Because if they know it's going to be rented by this date— we do not have that, and our market is really messed up too, Atlanta. It's very difficult to rent properties, so you'll have some that just sit for months.

Oh wow. Yeah, we're, we're lucky in Columbus. We're not experiencing any major delays on leasing. And so, yeah, that is powerful to be able to tell our owners, like, nearly all of our properties are rented within 3 weeks or whatever. Any other thoughts, questions? Great stuff, Peter. Thank you all. Yeah, appreciate you. Enjoyed being here in conversation with everybody. I always learn something, even when I'm the one speaking. So thanks, everyone, for coming out today.