The owner wanted to fire me. We changed one thing about the turn instead.

I run the management side and one of my owners, single house, 3/2, was about to leave in January. His complaint was fair. His house had sat empty 51 days on the previous turn and he'd paid two months of holding cost for a rent that only went up 25 dollars.

What we changed is small. We stopped starting the turn after the tenant handed back keys. On the 60 day notice we scheduled the cleaner, the carpet guy, and the painter for the day after move-out, and we started marketing at day 45 with photos of the house as it was, disclosed as occupied and listed with the actual availability date. Showings began three days after the tenant left.

Numbers on the next turn: vacancy 11 days instead of 51. Rent went from 1,650 to 1,780. Turn cost 2,340, which was higher than his last one because we did paint properly instead of touching up. Net to him against the prior turn, roughly 2,200 saved on holding plus 1,560 a year of additional rent.

The part that nearly broke it. The outgoing tenant did not want strangers walking through with her stuff there, and she was legally entitled to reasonable notice, which in my state has a specific meaning I confirmed before I scheduled anything. She was also a good tenant I'd have liked to keep. We ended up doing two grouped showing windows on Saturdays and gave her 200 dollars off the last month for the inconvenience. If she'd said no outright, we'd have lost most of the 40 days.

What I'd keep: booking the vendors off the notice date instead of the key date. That's the whole thing. The vendors were always the bottleneck, and they book two to three weeks out.