A make-ready priced per unit without a written scope is how a service business loses money on apartment work

Worth walking through for anyone on the service side considering apartment work, because the mistake is simple and it happens often. A make-ready, or a turn, is the work done on an apartment after one resident leaves and before the next one moves in. Paint, clean, small repairs, replace whatever's broken. Apartment communities generate a lot of these because a chunk of residents move out every year. Take an operator who bids a make-ready contract at a 240-unit community. Flat $385 per one-bedroom, $455 per two-bedroom, roughly 90 turns a year expected. The price gets built off houses done previously, figuring two people for a day and a half, materials included. What often does not get defined is what a turn includes. A property's idea of a turn can include full paint every time, not touch-up. It can include blinds, cleaning appliances that were assumed to fall to a separate cleaning vendor, and on any unit vacant more than 30 days, a re-clean before move-in because dust settles. About one in six units can also come with what the property calls normal damage, meaning drywall patching priced as an extra on one side and included on the other. A real average in a case like this can come in around $490 against a quote of $385 to $455. On 87 turns that is roughly $9,000 eaten over the year, plus a lot of weekend labor. The fix: write a scope sheet with a line for every task and get the site manager to initial it, then price two tiers, a standard turn and a heavy turn, with a written trigger for which one applies (over 30 days vacant, or damage over some dollar threshold). Walking six recent turns before quoting anything is worth asking for. Most properties will allow it.