Turn is the two to six weeks between leases when every unit in the property is inspected, repaired, cleaned and inspected again. It is the busiest operational window of the year, it decides how much damage revenue you recover, and in most residences it is run on paper and memory. This guide sets out how to run it as a repeatable process, and gives you a checklist template to work from.
The goal of a turn inspection is not simply to find damage. It is to produce a defensible record: what the unit looked like when the outgoing resident left, what work was done, and what the incoming resident is receiving. Every charge you send and every dispute you win comes out of that record.
The turn is a compressed cycle that repeats across every unit in your portfolio at the same time. Leases end within days of each other, hundreds of units empty, and the same units have to be ready for a move-in wave a few weeks later. Nothing about it is gradual, which is why the process has to be identical from unit to unit.
Treat the turn as four sequential passes rather than one big cleanup. Each pass has a different owner, a different output, and a clear handoff to the next one. When the passes blur together, work gets repeated, charges get missed, and units get released as ready before anyone has actually confirmed they are.
Run the same four passes on every unit, in the same order, with a record produced at each step.
Budget roughly 15 to 25 minutes per bedroom for the move-out inspection, and slightly less for the final walk once repairs are done. A four bed apartment therefore takes about an hour and a half across the two inspection passes, before any cleaning or maintenance time. Multiply that by your unit count and you have a realistic staffing plan instead of an optimistic one.
Pair a maintenance technician with an operations or residence life staff member for the move-out pass, so damage is identified and priced by someone who knows the repair cost. Keep inspection and cleaning in separate hands. A cleaner who inspects the room they are about to clean has an obvious incentive to record it as fine, and the record loses its independence the moment that happens.
Photos are the whole case. Take dated photos per room and per asset, not one wide shot of the apartment: mattress, desk, chair, walls, floor, appliances, bathroom fittings. Shoot from the same angle at move-in and move-out so the two images can sit side by side without argument about what changed.
Use the identical template at both ends of the lease. If the move-in form has 22 line items and the move-out form has 14, the six items you cannot compare are the six you will never charge for. One template, both directions, same asset names, same order.
Almost every failed turn looks the same from the inside. Inspections are done from memory and written up later that evening, by which time three apartments have merged into one. Charges are sent without evidence attached, so the first email a resident sends kills them. Work orders are passed along in text messages and group chats, so a unit is marked ready while a broken blind is still sitting in someone's phone.
The other quiet failure is the missing final walk. Units get released straight from cleaning with no photo record, so the next move-out inspection has nothing to compare against and the whole cycle starts unarmed.
In Campus Pilot the inspection runs on a phone, room by room and asset by asset, with photos attached as staff walk. Nothing is written up later, because the record is finished when the walk is finished.
Work orders are created directly from the inspection, so a cracked blind found on the walk becomes a tracked ticket with a trade and a due date before anyone leaves the unit. Damaged or missing assets are priced from your asset list and billed back automatically with the evidence attached. The final walk then produces the move-in record for the next resident, so every lease starts with the comparison already in place. See every Campus Pilot feature, or book a demo and we will run a turn on your own units.
Two pages: a move-out inspection grid covering every room with condition, photo reference and charge columns, plus a make-ready work order log and final walk sign-off.
Download the turn inspection checklist (PDF)Thanks. Here is your template, and a copy is on its way to the team.
Download the turn inspection checklist (PDF)Plan 15 to 25 minutes per bedroom for the move-out inspection and a little less for the final walk. A four bed apartment is roughly an hour and a half of inspection time across both passes, excluding cleaning and repairs. Building that number into the turn schedule is the difference between a plan that holds and one that slips in week one.
No. The person who cleans a unit has an incentive to record it as already fine, and an inspection carried out by that same person is easy to challenge later. Keep the inspection with maintenance or operations staff, and keep cleaning separate, so the record stays independent of the work being assessed.
Dated photos of every room and every priced asset, taken from the same angle at move-in and move-out. Wide shots of an apartment are not enough, because a stained mattress or a damaged desk is not visible in them. Per asset images are what let you place the two records side by side and show exactly what changed during the lease.
Within days of the move-out inspection, with the paired photos attached to the notice. The longer the gap, the weaker the charge looks and the more likely it is to be disputed. Sending an itemized notice while the stay is still recent removes most of the argument before it starts.
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