Owner budget wants 3% NOI growth, insurance came back up 24%. Where is that supposed to come from?

48% turnover on 620 units is about 300 moveouts a year, times $1,400 is $417k of pure friction. Five points of retention is 31 turns, call it $43k, before you count the concession you didn't have to give the replacement resident. That's not the whole 3% but it's a bigger single line than anything I'd find in landscaping contracts.

Naive question on the renewal side. If new leases need a month free, what are you asking existing residents for at renewal? A 3% renewal increase on 300 staying households seems to move more money than anything on the expense side, unless it just pushes them out the door.

Centralized leasing works when the three sites are close enough that a shared leasing team can physically get between them, and a mile apart qualifies. What broke it for us the first time was tours. We centralized inquiry handling and application processing, kept a person on each site for tours and move-ins, and ended up around one leasing person per 250 units against the old one per 150. The savings were real. The thing that nearly killed it was accountability, because when nobody owns the closing ratio at a specific property, the weakest property gets starved of attention. We had to keep property-level conversion reporting to fix that.

How is the concession being booked? One month free amortized over the lease versus taken up front changes what your NOI line looks like without changing a dollar of cash. If the owner's 3% is measured on a statement where concessions get amortized, part of that gap might be an accounting argument rather than an operations one.

As the sort of person who'd be reading that budget from the outside, I'd want the insurance quote and the comp set behind the 1.9% attached to it. A budget that treats a 24% insurance jump as a given and still asks for 3% NOI growth is asking you to sign something you already said you can't do. Who wrote it, the asset manager or you?

Turn time is where I'd look before headcount. Late 90s garden product, so you've got original water heaters going and 30 year old shutoffs. If make-ready is running 12 days and you get it to 6 across 300 turns, at $48 a day of rent that's $70k of recovered occupancy. That means parts on the shelf, a paint contractor with a standing schedule, and someone walking the unit the day notice is given instead of the day after moveout.

Insurance isn't an operations problem and you'll wear yourself out treating it like one. The levers are deductible, limits, and whether the three properties get marketed as a single schedule with loss history you can explain. That conversation belongs to the owner and the broker, and it should happen 120 days out, not at renewal.

Retention is real dollars, and it's slower than a budget cycle. The pieces that moved for us were completion time on work orders, a renewal offer going out 120 days ahead instead of 60, and pricing renewals off the resident's actual alternative rather than off the new-lease sheet. What I'd flag in your numbers is that centralizing leasing and pushing retention pull against each other in the first year. The centralized team doesn't know the residents, renewals get handled as a mail merge, and you lose on the back end what you saved on payroll. If it were mine I'd centralize the applications and the after-hours inquiry and leave renewals with the site. Whether that still gets you to 3% I doubt, and I'd say so in writing before you sign the budget.