An apartment make-ready checklist in the order the work happens,
with tick boxes by area, a vendor line for each, and a turn timeline: the target
ready date, the earliest sensible showing date if you market during the
make-ready, and the vacant days this turn will cost.
Set the move-out date, the unit type and the scope, then adjust
the days for each area to match your trades. Repairs by area run alongside each
other; paint, flooring, the final clean and the ready inspection follow in that
order, so no trade undoes another's work. Changing the unit type or scope resets
the days.
Every day count here is a placeholder, not a benchmark.
We know of no published US or Canadian series for make-ready time; replace them
with your own after a quarter of measuring.
Source: releaser.io/tools/make-ready-checklist/
How the timeline is worked out
- Day 0 is move-out: inspection, keys, locks and meters.
- Repairs by area run at the same time, so the repair phase is as long as
the longest area, not the sum of them.
- Then in order: paint, flooring, final clean, ready inspection. The
target ready date is move-out plus repairs plus each of those.
- Earliest showing is the day after paint and flooring finish, when the
unit reads as nearly finished. A unit with the carpet up shows like a building
site; whether to show it at all before it is ready is a per-unit call.
- Vacant days this turn = the turn length + your estimate of days from
ready to lease start. Marketing from notice, rather than from ready, is what
brings that second number down.
Placeholder days: a light turn comes to three days, a standard one-bedroom to
five and a heavy one to ten; three or more bedrooms, or a house, adds a day to
paint and flooring on standard and heavy turns, and a house adds a day of
cleaning. Write your own in and the dates follow.
