Attributing days-vacant savings to paid photography and copy on turnovers is harder than it looks

Take a 14 unit portfolio, mostly two bedroom units in a working class suburb. In a baseline year, turnovers run on the owner's own phone photos and a description copied forward from the last tenant's listing. Average days vacant across 11 turnovers: 19. The following year, hiring out at $180 per unit for a photographer and $65 per unit for written copy from a freelancer produces nine turnovers averaging 14 days vacant. That's five days each, and at $1,150 rent a day is roughly $38, so about $190 of recovered rent per unit against $245 of spend. Slightly underwater on that math alone. Two complications usually show up. Asking rent might have been raised $40 across the board and still filled faster, suggesting the listings are doing real work. And a couple of units in a building where a neighboring complex started a concession war might take 31 and 27 days, dragging the average. Stripping those two out, the remaining seven units might average 9 days, which is ten days better at $38, or $380 recovered against $245 spent. That looks clearly favorable, and the honest caveat is that excluding units after seeing the numbers introduces bias into the comparison. A reasonable decision framework when the photographer contract renews: keep photography, since visual quality reliably moves inquiries, and evaluate the copy separately by testing an AI-drafted description against the freelancer's for a few units rather than dropping the service on instinct. A freelancer who consistently leads with the actual strongest feature of each unit is often worth the modest per-unit cost even when the writing quality feels similar on the surface.