For property managers
Rental turns, signed off against a 13-point photo checklist
Trash-out, repairs, paint, clean and a photographed sign-off, so the condition of the unit is on record before the next tenant walks in. Repeat-bought by three property managers.
What actually makes a rental turn miss its date?
Almost never the trade work. It is a door, a part or an appliance that nobody ordered in the first week, and a clean that was scheduled to start after the repairs finished instead of alongside them. On the four-bedroom Lansing turn written up on this site the cleaning crew started two days before the repair list closed out, the two ran as separate scopes on separate invoices, and it hit its date. A turn is a scheduling problem before it is a trade problem, and the way we bill it — repairs, clean and trash-out as separate scopes — exists so you can see which part is actually slipping.
- Kinds of work on this page
- 1
- Invoiced jobs behind them
- 22
- Case studies
- 2
- Towns with work on record
- 4
What this actually covers
Taken from the scopes on our own invoices rather than from a list of services, so it is the work as it was actually bought.
Rental Turnover & Make-Ready
The full turn between tenants — trash-out, repairs, paint, clean and a photo-verified checklist.
- Trash-out and haul-away of everything left behind
- Repairs: drywall, doors, jambs, trim, fixtures
- Paint touch-up or full repaint
- Deep clean and standard clean
- Move-in maintenance lists: house numbers, detectors, screens, blinds, seats
- 13-point photo-verified sign-off
What it costs, and what that is based on
This is work-order work, billed as labour against a rate agreed with each property manager, with materials at cost and receipts attached. The figures below are exactly that and should be read as that — they are not what a homeowner would pay for the same work, and one turn can appear as a small number or a large one depending on which of the separately-invoiced parts you are looking at.
Every figure below came out of an invoice this company sent between October 2025 and September 2026, and it is printed with the number of jobs behind it. Where the record is too thin or belongs to one customer, that is said instead of averaged — a price nobody can check is worth nothing to you.
Rental Turnover & Make-Ready
- Property-manager work order
$150–$356.25
The middle half of 20 invoiced jobs across 2 different customers. The median was $250 and the full spread was $50 to $1,180. Invoiced between April 2026 and September 2026.
Labour only — materials on top, at cost, with the receipt.
- Homeowner, quoted project
$590 and $628.35
Two jobs, and those are the two prices — deliberately not written as a range, because two numbers do not make one. n=2, indicative only. Invoiced between January 2026 and January 2026.
Labour only — materials on top, at cost, with the receipt.
Derived on 2026-09-11 from 337 QuickBooks invoices covering 709 line items, 289 jobs and 84 customer quote documents. Property-manager figures are labour billed against a rate negotiated with that manager; homeowner figures are quoted fixed prices. The two are never blended, because the same trade appears in both at up to a fiftyfold difference and an average of them would be wrong for everybody.
The terms, in full
There is no charge for turning up, looking, or coming back.
Coming out
No charge
No trip charge, no call-out minimum, no diagnostic fee, and no charge for a return visit. Attendance and diagnosis of what you reported are included in the job price. True on all 84 written quotes this company has issued.
Materials
At cost, no markup
Supplied at cost with the receipt attached, and not discounted either — there is no margin in them to discount. Across eleven months of invoices, materials are $10,080 of $210,693 billed on labour-and-materials lines: 4.8%.
Anything outside the quote
$65 an hour plus materials
And only with your approval, in writing, before it is done. A fixed price is not a promise that nothing will be found behind a wall — it is a promise that you decide about it before it is billed rather than after.
Warranty
1 year on all labour
Two years on PVC trim installation and on flooring, stair and trim-joint work. Materials you supply yourself are not covered — our work on them is.
Payment
50% / 50%
Half on signing, which secures the date and buys the materials, and half on completion. A labour-only quote carries no deposit at all, because a deposit exists to purchase materials and that quote has none.
First-time customers
10% off labour
Applied to labour only, because materials are already at cost. Repeat and loyalty customers get the same 10%.
Where we stop
A contractor who writes down what they will not do is worth more than one who says yes to everything. These are the boundaries our own quotes already carry, in the same words.
- We are not a cleaning company that also fixes things, and not a contractor that also runs a mop. Both are in-house, but they are scoped, scheduled and invoiced separately on purpose.
- Anything found that is licensed scope — a panel, a gas appliance, a sewer line — is named on the report and referred, not absorbed into the turn.
- A tenant’s possessions left behind are photographed before anything is moved. What happens to them after that is the property manager’s call and the law’s, not ours.
Finished and invoiced
2 jobs of this kind, written up in full
Each one names its QuickBooks invoice number. Nothing on this site is a quote that was accepted and never done — the photographs of those are excellent and they are a portfolio of work we have not carried out.
Towns with turnover & make-ready on the books
We do every service on this site across all ten towns. These are the ones with completed, invoiced work of this kind behind them, which is a different and more useful claim.
Questions we get asked about this
- What is on the 13-point checklist?
- The condition items a dispute normally turns on, photographed at sign-off: the state of each room, the fixtures, the detectors, the screens and blinds, the appliances and the exterior. It exists so that the condition of the unit at handover is a record rather than a memory, and no competitor in this market advertises one.
- Can you do the repairs and the clean, or only one?
- Both, and running them in parallel is usually what saves the date. They are quoted and invoiced as separate scopes so the cost of each is visible rather than buried in a single turnover number.
- Do you work from our work-order system?
- Yes. Work orders arrive by email from property-manager systems and are picked up automatically, so a job does not wait for somebody to notice it. Three property managers buy turns from us repeatedly.
- Do you provide a W-9 and a certificate of insurance?
- With every signed quote, without being asked for them.
- Do you charge a call-out fee or a trip charge?
- No — and no diagnostic fee and no charge for a return visit either. Attendance and diagnosis of the items you reported are included in the job price, and there is no minimum charge and no call-out minimum on any of the 84 written quotes this company has issued. Where a job is far enough out to need several days of round trips, a mobilisation figure is agreed with you in writing before anything starts, or the schedule is compressed into fewer longer days instead.
- What happens if the job turns out to be bigger than the quote?
- It becomes a written change order, priced and agreed before the work goes ahead, and it appears on the invoice by name. Anything outside the written scope is $65 an hour plus materials, and only with your approval — that rate is printed on every quote this company issues.
- Do you mark up materials?
- No. Materials are supplied at cost with the receipt attached, and the invoice record says so rather than the marketing: across eleven months, materials are $10,080 of $210,693 billed on labour-and-materials lines, which is 4.8% of it. On larger projects plenty of customers buy the materials themselves, and those are shown on the quote at no charge.
- Are you insured, and do you hold a contractor licence?
- Fully insured, and a W-9 and a certificate of insurance go out with every signed quote without being asked for. On licensing we are direct, because it is the question that matters and the one most trade websites blur: the Michigan residential builder licence is not held and no contractor licence is claimed or implied. Electrical and plumbing work here is repair and like-for-like replacement on what already exists — new circuits, panels, service upgrades, water-heater replacement and anything else requiring a licensed trade is referred out and named as such on the quote.
Need turnover & make-ready quoting?
Tell us what is wrong and we will come and look — no trip charge, no call-out minimum and no diagnostic fee. You get a fixed price in writing with the exclusions listed as plainly as the inclusions, and materials at cost with the receipts attached.