Quoting turns on a 96-unit. How do I price the empty days?

Flat price with a defined scope and a written trigger for anything outside it. Don't do open time and materials, owners hate the surprise more than they hate the number.

The trigger is what you spend your time on. Write the standard turn as a list of exactly what's included, then say anything requiring drywall replacement over X square feet, subfloor work, cabinet replacement, or odor remediation comes out of the flat and gets priced separately with photos before work starts. Photos before work starts is the whole thing. I've eaten $4k because I fixed something obvious and then argued about it after.

Your one-in-six wrecked units aren't turns, they're small renovations. Price them as such and stop trying to average them into a per-unit number.

Your math is understating you. You compared $550 extra cost to $572 of recovered rent and called it a wash, but you left out that their 21 days is an average, and averages on turn time hide a long tail. Ask for the distribution. If the median is 14 and the mean is 21, there are units sitting 45 days and those are where your value is.

Also 13 days times 40 turns is 520 unit-days a year. At $44 that's $22,880 of recovered revenue against $22,000 of extra cost. Still close. But recovered revenue at a 5.5% cap is roughly $415k of value if it's permanent, and that is the number you put in front of an owner, not the annual wash. Their occupancy goes up about 1.5 points and NOI follows.

One thing I'd check: can they actually lease the unit on day 9? If leasing takes 18 days to fill regardless, your 8-day turn buys nothing and you'll get blamed when it doesn't show up.

The question I'd be embarrassed to ask and will anyway: if you promise 8 days and it takes 15 because a vanity got delivered wrong, who pays the rent for those 7 days? Is that in your quote as a penalty, or does it just get discussed awkwardly?

Because if you're not taking a penalty, you're not really selling speed, you're selling an intention. And if you are taking one, you need supplier terms behind it. @windlass point about leasing cuts both ways, you might want the promise to start the clock at keys-in-hand rather than move-out.

How are you handling fourteen turns in July and two in January? That's the part I'd get wrong. Two people plus a painter full time means you're paying them through a dead winter or you're rehiring every spring, and the good ones don't come back.

Can you fill winter with the wrecked units and the common area work? If the owner will bundle hallway paint and the make-ready backlog into the slow months you've got a real year. If not you're subcontracting the summer peak and your quality promise is somebody else's crew.

Flat pricing on turns cost me real money on one property, so a warning. I signed a flat number based on a walk of four vacant units. The four they showed me were the four best. Actual mix was older, more original bathrooms, more of the units where the previous tenant had been there eleven years and everything was at the end of its life.

Before you quote, walk at least ten and insist on seeing two occupied units on notice. And get the average tenancy length. @harrow if their 42% turnover is mostly short-stay units churning, your turns are easy. If it's a bimodal thing where half the building never moves, the ones that do move are gut jobs and $3,400 is fantasy.

Reading this from a market where rents are $700 and a day empty costs $23. None of the speed argument works down here, 21 days of downtime is $483 and nobody's paying a $550 premium to fix it. What sells is the cheaper turn, full stop.

Which is really just to say your whole pitch depends on that $1,340 rent. If the owner has a second property at half the rent, don't assume the same quote travels.