How to price apartment turnover cleaning.

Most people price a turnover clean by remembering what they charged last time and adding a bit. That works until you hit a unit that eats a whole day, and then you find out you were never really pricing anything — you were guessing, and the guess happened to be close.

Here's the method I use instead. It takes longer the first time and about ten minutes every time after that.

What a turnover clean includes — and what it doesn't.

Before you can price it you have to agree on what it is. A turnover clean — a make-ready clean, same thing — is the deep clean of a vacant unit between one tenant leaving and the next one signing. It is not a recurring maid service and it is not a post-construction clean, and the price for all three is different.

On a normal turn you're doing:

• Kitchen: inside and outside of every cabinet and drawer, inside the oven, under and behind the range, inside and behind the fridge, sink and faucet, countertops
• Bathrooms: tub or shower and the grout, toilet including the base and behind it, vanity inside and out, mirror, exhaust fan cover
• Everywhere: baseboards, door frames and door tops, light switches, outlet covers, blinds, window sills, interior glass, closet shelves and tracks, vents and returns
• Floors: vacuum, mop, and whatever the hard-surface finish needs
• Fixtures: light covers down and washed, bulbs noted if they're out

What isn't in it, unless you said so in writing: carpet cleaning, paint, trash removal, appliance repair, pest treatment, and anything involving biohazard. Those are separate lines with separate prices. The fastest way to lose money on a turn is to let "just a quick clean" quietly grow to include hauling the sofa somebody left in the second bedroom.

Start with what an hour of your crew actually costs.

Not their wage. Their cost. Those are different numbers and the gap is where the money goes.

Take what you pay somebody per hour, then add the part you pay on top of it — payroll taxes, workers' comp, any insurance that scales with payroll, and the share of your truck, fuel, equipment, and supplies that gets used up on the job. Whatever that total comes to is your loaded cost per labor hour. It's the only number you should be doing arithmetic with.

So say you pay $18 an hour, and once you add the burden and the truck and the supplies it comes to $27. That $27 is what an hour costs you before you've made a dime. If you quote a four-hour turn at $150, you have cleaned an apartment for free and paid $8 for the privilege. That happens more often than anyone admits, because $150 sounds like money and $108 of cost doesn't announce itself.

Then decide the margin you want on top. Pick it deliberately, write it down, and use the same one every time — that's what keeps your pricing consistent when you're tired and the manager is nice and you want the job.

How long a turn really takes. Measure it, don't remember it.

For the next five turns, write down the start time, the finish time, and how many people were on it. Not an estimate at the end of the week — write it on the sheet at the unit.

You'll get two things out of that. First, actual labor hours per unit type, which is the number your whole price is built on. Second, and this is the useful one, you'll find out that the jobs you thought were the same are not. Two 900-square-foot two-bedrooms can be three hours apart depending on who lived in them.

Multiply your hours by your number of bodies to get labor hours. One person for six hours and three people for two hours are both six labor hours, and both cost you the same. How you staff it changes how fast you're out, not what it cost.

The five things that move the price.

Square footage matters less than people think. These matter more.

1. Condition. The single biggest factor, and the one that isn't in the work order. A tenant who cleaned on the way out versus one who left food in the fridge and the power off for two weeks — same floor plan, double the hours.
2. Bathroom count. Bathrooms are the slowest rooms per square foot in the building. Two baths is not slightly more work than one.
3. Kitchen condition. Specifically the oven, the range hood, and behind and under the fridge. Grease is a time sink with no upper limit.
4. What's still in the unit. If anything has to leave before you can clean, that's a trash-out line, priced by the load with the dump fee in it. Never fold it into the clean.
5. Access and timing. Third floor with no elevator. No water on. No power, so you're working off a light. Keys at an office across town. A 48-hour window because the new tenant signed already. Every one of those costs real time, and rush work is a real line item you're allowed to charge for.

Which is why you don't quote from a phone call. You quote from a walk-through, or you quote a range in writing and confirm after you've seen it.

Flat rate or hourly. Quote one, track the other.

Property managers want a flat number. They're comparing vendors and they need one figure per unit type to put in a spreadsheet, and "it depends" reads as "this one will be a hassle."

So quote flat, per unit type — one-bed, two-bed, three-bed — but build the flat number out of hours, and keep tracking hours after you win it. That way you find out in month two that your three-bedroom price is short, instead of finding out in year two.

Hourly has one good use: the unusual jobs. Fire and water damage, hoarding, anything where you genuinely cannot see the bottom. For those, quote an hourly rate with a written not-to-exceed number and a clause that says you stop and call before you pass it. That protects both of you, and managers respect it more than a number you invented to sound brave.

A worked example: two-bed, one-bath.

Vacant, normal wear, tenant took everything with them, power and water on. All figures invented for the sake of the arithmetic.

Line	Basis	Illustrative
Crew labor	7 labor hours × $27 loaded	$189
Supplies	Chemicals, pads, bags, filters	$14
Drive and load-in	0.75 hr × $27, plus mileage	$28
Your cost		$231
Margin	At your chosen target	$99
Quote	Flat, per unit	$330

Now run the check that matters. $330 across seven labor hours is about $47 a labor hour coming in, against $27 going out. That's the number to compare against your other work — not the $330, which tells you nothing on its own. A $330 turn that takes twelve hours is a worse job than a $210 turn that takes four.

And if the same unit came with a fridge full of spoiled food, the power off, and a mattress in the back bedroom, it is not a $330 job. It's the $330 clean plus additional hours for the kitchen plus a trash-out line with the dump fee and the mattress surcharge in it. Two different jobs wearing the same floor plan.

What the property manager will push back on.

Three things, nearly always.

"Your number's higher than the last guy." Probably true. Don't defend the number — show what's in it. A one-page scope that lists inside the oven, behind the fridge, blinds, baseboards, and vent covers is a better answer than a discount, because the last guy was almost certainly not doing all of it. Sometimes you lose that one anyway. You'll get a call in four months.

"Can you do a flat rate for all our units?" Yes, by unit type, with a written condition standard and a change-order process for units that fall below it. Never one price for every unit in a portfolio you haven't seen.

"We need it by Friday." That's a real service and it has a real price. Rush work either charges a premium or it doesn't get charged for at all, and that's a decision you make before they ask, not while they're asking.

Where crews lose money on turnover cleans.

None of these are exotic. All of them are things I've done.

• Dump fees you forgot to charge for. I've eaten more of these than I want to write down. The trash goes in the truck and the ticket comes out of your pocket.
• Scope creep with no paper. "While you're in there, could you —" is fine. It's fine at a price, in writing, before you do it.
• Drive time treated as free. Forty minutes each way is more than an hour of paid labor you didn't bill.
• The same price for a unit in twice the condition. Condition is a line item, not a mood.
• No before photos. Then the manager says the fridge was already scratched, and it's your word against a repair bill. Photograph everything before you touch it and after you're done. Every time, even when you're in a hurry, especially when you're in a hurry.
• A cheap price on the first job "to get in." The first price you give is the price they expect forever, and the raise conversation is much harder than the first quote.

Before you send the number.

Run the same checks in the same order every time. Every line priced or explicitly excluded. Hours based on something you measured. Condition accounted for. Dump fees in, if anything's leaving. Drive time in. Rush premium decided. Photos taken. And the profit check at the end — what this job pays you per labor hour, and whether that beats what else you could do with the day.

That last one is the one people skip, and it's the one that tells you when to say no. Being busy and being paid are not the same thing.