The room-by-room make-ready standard, realistic timing, and how to stop paying one-off rates for every turn.
Every vacant day costs you money. On a $1,500 unit, a 30-day vacancy is $50 a day walking out the door, and cleaning is the step that stalls more make-readies than any other. Here is the turnover checklist our crews work from in apartment communities across the Mid-Atlantic, plus the scheduling and contract moves that keep turns fast and cheap.
A turnover clean (also called a make-ready clean or unit turn) brings a vacated apartment back to showing condition. It happens after maintenance repairs and paint, and before leasing photos and the first showing. Done right, it covers every surface a prospective renter will touch, open, or look inside. Done wrong, it costs you the lease: renters forgive dated finishes far more easily than they forgive someone else's grime.
The kitchen is the most labor-intensive room in any turn, and the oven is the biggest single time sink. A neglected oven can add an hour by itself. It is also the first thing many prospects open.
Vacuum and mop all hard flooring, including under appliances and inside closets. Carpet usually needs professional hot-water extraction at turnover, not just vacuuming; budget for it on any tenancy over a year. Spot-clean wall scuffs, wipe switch plates and door handles, and clean door frames. Baseboards get dusted first, then wiped. Skipped baseboards are one of the most common reasons a unit gets flagged on final walkthrough.
Small items read as neglect in photos and showings. Our crews check these on every turn:
Sequence matters more than speed. A typical schedule: move-out inspection on day zero, maintenance and paint on days one through three, cleaning immediately after, then photos and showings. Cleaning always goes last among the trades. Sending cleaners in before paint and repairs are finished is the most common self-inflicted delay, because drywall dust and painter foot traffic force a re-clean.
The clean itself should take hours, not days: roughly two to four crew hours for a typical one or two bedroom unit in average condition, and up to double that for a heavily soiled unit. If your community batches move-outs at month-end, book cleaning capacity in advance so five units do not wait in line behind one crew.
Most vendors quote a flat per-unit rate that scales with bedroom count, with upcharges for heavy soil, neglected appliances, or smoke and pet remediation, plus a separate line for carpet extraction. A standard one bedroom in decent shape costs a fraction of what a three bedroom with years of heavy cooking will run. Watch the trip minimums on one-off work: a vendor driving out for a single unit may charge nearly as much to show up as to clean. That overhead is exactly what a bundled arrangement eliminates.
Someone other than the person who cleaned it. Five minutes with fresh eyes and the checklist above catches the streaked mirror or the missed vent cover that a crew stops seeing after four hours inside a unit. At Levdok a supervisor walks every completed turn before we call it done, so your leasing team is never doing our quality control.
If your community already has contracted common-area cleaning, treating every unit turn as a separate one-off vendor call is the expensive way to do it. Each one-off comes with a minimum trip charge, scheduling from scratch, a crew that does not know your standards, and one more insurance certificate to chase.
Bundling fixes all four. Levdok builds unit turns into contracted hours where the schedule allows, so a crew that is already on your property handles turns at a pre-agreed unit rate. You get one invoice, one manager, one quality standard, and faster response when a surprise move-out hits, because the crew is already on site. Details are on our apartment community cleaning page.
Whether you need one building's common areas covered or unit turns folded into an existing scope, we will walk the property and give you a number you can plan around. Request a free walkthrough or call 410-982-6584.
We turn units fast, on a schedule that matches your leasing calendar.
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