Contractor · Scotrun, PA · Member since 2026 · 22 posts · 2 votes
Our standard is 5 days door-to-door for a normal turn (paint, patch, cabinets touched up, floors, final clean). The schedule that makes it work: day 1 walk + list, days 1-2 repairs, 2-3 paint, 4 floors/fixtures, 5 clean + punch. What breaks it is almost never the work — it's waiting on decisions and parts. What's your realistic turn time, and what usually blows it up?
Gelu Mergl · All Building Services LLC — Apartment turns & inspection repairs for property managers · renovatemyapartment.com · Since 1985
Five days door to door is a solid standard, and I think you're right that the work itself is rarely what slows a turn down. It's usually the pause between the walk and the yes.
I'm not a property manager myself, so I can't give you my own turn time. But from the systems side, the fix I'd look at is the day 1 list. If the walk produces a short, priced scope the same afternoon, with each item marked repair or replace and a photo next to it, the owner or PM can approve it in one sitting instead of over three phone calls. The parts a standard turn almost always needs, like blinds, outlet covers and the common faucet cartridges, can be on the shelf before the tenant even moves out.
Reading the walk notes and photos and turning them into that one-page scope is something AI does really well, so nobody loses a day writing it up.
My background is vacation-rental management, so the timing is different, but the handoff problem sounds familiar. I'd put a named decision-maker and an approval deadline beside every item that can stop the next trade. Also reserve a separate final inspection after the clean; otherwise the cleaner ends up finding the unfinished work when you're supposed to be handing over keys. Does your five-day clock include waiting for owner approvals, or does it start once the scope is approved? That distinction would make comparisons a lot more useful.
Five days is a fair standard for a light apartment turn with that scope, and you're right that decisions are usually the bottleneck, not the work. On our side, single-family houses in Memphis run longer, so we plan rent-ready turnovers on a 21-day schedule from the day the keys come back.
The clock has to start at a fixed point or the number means nothing. Ours starts at move-out, and the scope is set from the walkthrough photos and notes before any trade is booked. Contractors are already tested in small paid steps months before we need them, so we're not hunting for help mid-turn.
The math drives the urgency: vacancy and turnover cost us more than the repairs themselves, so a turn that drags because nobody approved the scope is the expensive kind. What part of your five days usually slips first — the scope approval or getting the trades lined up?