Welcome to the 5 Minute Prime Podcast. Quick actionable tips to master personal finance and real estate investing. In just five minutes a day, we'll help you build wealth and achieve financial freedom. Hey Prime Investors, Martin Maxwell here. Welcome back to the 5-Minute Prime Podcast. Here's a shape I want you to sit with for a second. The work it takes to turn a unit, clean it, paint it, fix what broke, get it rentable again, runs about a week. Three to ten days, depending on how rough the move out was. The unit sits empty for about a month, and almost all of your attention goes to the week. That's the whole episode. Not that turnovers are expensive, you know that. It's that the part you're managing and the part you're paying for are two different parts. Let me put a number on the empty window first, because I don't want this to be a feeling. The Census Bureau runs a survey every quarter that measures what share of rental units in this country are sitting vacant and available. The most recent read is 7.3%. That's up from 6.6 two years ago, and it's been flat for two straight quarters. Now 7.3% is a share of units at a moment in time. But run it across a calendar and it tells you something more useful. It works out to about 27 days a year. That's the average American rental, empty for the better part of a month every year on average. So what's that worth? Our own rent data covers 750 metros, and the median one sits at $1,390 a month. $1,390 a month divided across $365 days is $45.70 a day. And 7.3% of a year's rent at that median is $1,218. Gone. Not to a repair, not to a vendor, to an empty room. And here's the part I find genuinely reassuring in a strange way. The National Apartment Association runs an annual survey that builds this number from the opposite direction, not from a vacancy rate at all, but from what operators actually report on their own books. Their benchmark for vacancy and rent loss is $1,323 per unit per year, $1,218 from a federal survey, $1323 from operator books, within 9% from two methods that share nothing. When two numbers that were built completely differently land that close together, that's not a coincidence. That's the actual size of the whole. And I want to be careful here because this is a baseline, not a per-turn figure. Some of those 27 days belong to units nobody's even trying to rent right now. If you run it the other way, the industry turnover rate is about 47%, and a listing takes about 30 days to lease, you land closer to 14 days a year. So call it somewhere between two weeks and a month. Both ends of that are uncomfortable. Alright, so of that empty month, what's genuinely not yours? The trades. Real work takes real time. A light turn, deep clean, touch-up paint, a couple of repairs, runs three to five days. A standard one, five to ten. A heavy turn with flooring and appliances can run ten to twenty one days, and no amount of calling anybody makes drywall dry faster. Material and appliance lead times are the same story. On a heavy turn, that's another week or more, and it's real. Permit review, if your scope needs one, is entirely out of your hands. And if you've got a slow contractor right now, that's a real problem, and I'm not going to tell you it isn't. Fire him if you need to. I'm just saying that when you add that list up honestly, on a normal turn it's somewhere around a week to ten days. Which means it is not where your month went. So let's go find the rest. Three places, and every one of them is a decision, not a fact. First, the gaps between the trades. Not the trades, the gaps. The painter finishes Tuesday, the flooring crew is booked until Friday, and three days evaporate with nobody working and nobody at fault. Do that twice in one turn, and you've spent more calendar on scheduling than on labor. The industry line I keep seeing is that the time between trades runs longer than the time within them. That's a scheduling problem wearing a construction costume. Second, the listing itself. Nationally, a rental takes about 30 days to go from listed to least, and earlier this year that stretched to 41 at the seasonal peak. But one property manager in San Diego published their own portfolio numbers this year, more than 400 units, and their average was 13 days. 13 against 30. And when they explain the gap, they don't say their market is special, they credit three things. Pricing the unit accurately against real comparable rents, putting up a listing that's actually worth looking at, and answering inquiries fast. Price, photos, and picking up the phone. That's the whole edge. Third, and this is the one I'd hand you if you only take one thing from today. The notice period. Your tenant tells you they're leaving. Depending on your lease, that's 30 or 60 days of warning. And in most portfolios, that letter gets filed and the actual work of turning the unit starts on the day the keys come back. Think about what you already own in that window. You can price the unit, you can shoot the listing, you can put it live, you can run showings while somebody's still living there if your lease allows it. Most do with proper notice. You can book every vendor, you can order the flooring so it's sitting in the garage on move out day instead of ordered on move out day. Two to four weeks of head start already paid for, and the standard practice is to file it. And this connects to something we've built here before. We costed out a full turn on this show once, line by line, and the drywall everybody fears came to about 18% of the bill, while the empty weeks were double every repair line combined. Same lesson, different door. The scary line item isn't the expensive one. We also ran what I called the turnover test. How many years of a rent increase does one turnover erase? The answer was years, not months, which is exactly why buying back two weeks of vacancy is worth more than most of the rent increases people agonize over. So here's where I land. The turnover isn't a construction project you're managing. It's a calendar you're either running or letting run you. The trades are about a week and they're mostly not yours. The other three weeks are almost entirely yours, and the richest ones happen while the unit is still occupied. And it matters more this month than most. Something close to half of all moves in this country happen between May and August. It's September. Every week a listing drifts now is a week further into a thinner pool of renters. Your challenge today, pull the lease on whichever unit is closest to its end date, and find the notice clause. 30 days, 60, whatever it says. Put that notice date on your calendar right now. And then the part that matters. Decide today what happens on that date, not what happens on move out day. On the notice date, the listing goes live, the vendors get called, and anything with a lead time gets ordered. Write those three things down next to the date so the decision is already made when the letter arrives. Because at nearly $46 a day, two weeks of head start is $640. You didn't have to earn.