Student housing turn week is the period, usually five to seven days in late July or August, in which every expiring lease in a property ends, every bed is inspected, cleaned and repaired, and the incoming residents move in. For a 400-bed asset that means roughly 120 units emptied on a Friday, turned over the weekend and the following two days, and re-occupied on the Wednesday. Nothing in conventional multifamily compares to it; a 300-unit apartment community turns that many units over an entire year.

Turn week is won in April. By the time move-out begins, the staffing, the vendors, the materials, the inspection process, the damage price list and the unit-by-unit schedule are either in place or they are not, and the week itself is execution. This is the student housing turnover plan for the August turn: what to do month by month from April, how to lock in labour, how to inspect and bill damage across hundreds of beds inside the legal deadlines, how to sequence move-out and make-ready by building, how to run move-in day, and how to see the status of every unit while it is happening.

The cost of getting it wrong, in vacancy, concessions and reputation, is covered in our existing post on the hidden costs of tenant turnover in student housing. This post is the plan that avoids them.

The timeline from April to move-in

The dates assume a move-out on the last Friday of July or first Friday of August and a move-in the following Wednesday, which is the common pattern for a fall semester starting mid-to-late August. Shift everything for your own dates; the sequence and the lead times do not change.

Treat the table as the turn week checklist for the property manager; the row that most operators miss is April week 2, the building walk. It sets the materials order, the heavy-turn list and the vendor scope. Everything downstream is sized from it.

Staffing and vendor lock-in

A 120-unit turn over four days is roughly 30 units a day through every trade. The numbers below are illustrative planning ratios; use your own productivity data once you have a year of it.

Cleaning at four to six units per two-person crew per day means five to eight crews on site. Paint touch-up at four to five units per painter per day means six to eight painters; full repaints on heavy-turn units need to be identified in July and crewed separately. Carpet cleaning at eight to ten units per technician per day means three or four technicians, with replacement flooring scheduled in June for units the April walk identified. Maintenance technicians run the repair list from the inspections, one per building. Inspectors at 12 to 15 units per person per day means eight to ten on the Saturday and Sunday, and they should not be the same people running move-in on Wednesday.

Vendor lock-in is the reason the bid packages go out in April. Every operator in the same university town wants the same cleaning and painting crews in the same week. The contract should fix the crew size, the dates, the daily unit target, the standard (attached as a checklist with photos), the price per unit by turn type (light, standard, heavy), and a penalty or right to supplement if the daily target is missed. Pay a deposit if that is what it takes to hold the crews; it is cheaper than a week of vacancy.

Temporary labour for move-out, junk removal and move-in is hired in May and onboarded in July. Student staff and residents' associations are a good source for move-in day; they are not a substitute for inspectors, who need training on the damage price list and the form.

Materials are ordered in May against the April walk: paint in the property's standard colours by the pallet, carpet and LVP by the roll for the identified units, appliance and furniture replacements, locks or cores for the re-key, cleaning consumables, light bulbs, blinds, smoke detector batteries, drip pans, toilet seats and shower heads in the quantities the last two years' turns consumed. Stage them by building in July, not in a central store that every crew has to walk to.

Inspection and damage billing at scale

Damage billing is where turn week produces revenue or produces disputes, and the difference is the inspection process.

The inspection form is one per bedroom and one for the unit's common areas, with a fixed list of items, a condition rating, a photo requirement for every item charged, and the damage price list built in so the inspector selects the charge rather than estimating it. The price list is set in June from the actual cost of each repair (labour and materials, with a stated markup if the lease allows one) and is published to residents with the move-out instructions, so a $75 charge for a missing drawer front is a known price, not a surprise.

Common-area damage in a shared unit is split across the beds in the unit by the rule in the lease, usually equally, unless a resident is identified as responsible. Bedroom damage is charged to that bed. Under by-the-bed leasing each resident's deposit is accounted for separately, which is why the inspection is by bedroom; the structure is in our guide to by-the-bed leasing.

The move-in inspection is the other half. The incoming resident completes a check-in inspection with photos within 24 to 48 hours of move-in, on the app or a form, and it becomes the baseline for next year's move-out. Without it, every charge next August is contestable.

Deposit accounting has a statutory deadline in most US states, commonly 14 to 30 days after move-out for the itemised statement and refund (for example, 21 days in California, 30 days in Texas and Florida where a claim is made). For a 400-bed property that is 400 itemised statements inside a month, which is not achievable from paper forms. The inspection data has to land in the resident's ledger as charges the day it is captured, so that the deposit statement is a report, not a project.

Pre-move-out inspections in July, with the resident present, cut the dispute rate more than any other step: the resident sees the damage, hears the price, and usually fixes or cleans it before move-out.

Move-out sequencing

Move-out is staggered by building and by time window, not left to residents to choose. Assign each building a check-out window on the Friday (Building A 8:00–11:00, Building B 11:00–14:00, and so on), publish it in June with the move-out instructions, and staff the key return desk and inspectors to the windows.

Offer an express move-out to residents whose July pre-inspection was clean: they clean to the standard, submit photos on the app, drop keys in a lockbox and leave, and the Saturday inspection confirms it. It removes a large share of Friday's desk traffic.

Sequence the heavy-turn units first through inspection on Saturday morning so that crews can start on them Saturday afternoon; they take two to three times as long as a standard unit and cannot wait until Monday. Junk removal follows the inspectors building by building, with dumpsters positioned per building and a rule that nothing is removed from a unit before the inspection photos are taken.

Residents who have not moved out by the end of their window are holdovers; the lease sets the daily charge and the process, and the property manager, not the inspector, handles them.

Make-ready sequencing by building

Make-ready runs building by building in the order the inspections finished, with the trades in a fixed sequence through each unit: junk and furniture out, repairs, paint, flooring or carpet cleaning, cleaning, furniture in, pest treatment, re-key, final walk. Each trade releases the unit to the next by updating its status, so a cleaner never arrives at a unit still being painted.

The building order should put the buildings with the earliest move-in windows first on Wednesday, and within a building, the heavy-turn units first because they take longest. Units that will not be ready on Wednesday are identified by Monday evening, and their incoming residents are contacted on Tuesday with an alternative (a delayed move-in with a credit, or a temporary bed) rather than finding out at the desk.

The final quality walk is one person per building with the checklist, and sign-off is what changes the unit's status to ready. The standard make-ready sequence for a single unit, with the per-trade checklist, is in our apartment make-ready checklist; make-ready student housing operators run in August is that checklist run 120 times in four days.

Move-in day logistics

Move-in day is a traffic and queue problem more than a maintenance one. Appointment windows by building, published in July, keep 400 families from arriving at 9:00. Parking and unloading zones are marked, with volunteers directing; carts and dollies are staged; lifts are reserved for move-in with a volunteer on each.

The key packet for each resident (keys or fob, parking permit, welcome sheet, Wi-Fi details, the check-in inspection link, the maintenance request instructions) is prepared in advance and handed over on ID check against the lease. Residents with an unpaid balance or a missing guarantor form are flagged before the day and resolved by phone in the week before, not at the desk with a queue behind them.

The maintenance team is on site and mobile on move-in day to handle the items the final walk missed (a dripping tap, a missing blind), logged as work orders from the resident's check-in inspection so they are tracked rather than shouted across a corridor. A same-day fix on move-in day is worth more to retention than anything in the amenity budget; our post on why retention is won in the first 90 days covers why.

Tracking every unit's status in one system

Turn week fails silently when the status of a unit lives in a text message. The property manager needs, at any moment, to see every unit by building with its stage (occupied, moved out, inspected, junk cleared, repairs, paint, flooring, clean, furniture, pest, re-keyed, final walk, ready, moved in), who has it, and what is blocking it.

In RIOO on NetSuite the turn is a set of work orders per unit generated from the move-out list, one per trade in sequence, assigned to the internal team or the vendor, with the status board by building as the live view. Move-out inspections are captured on mobile per bedroom and common area with photos, and the damage lines post directly to each resident's ledger against their deposit, so the deposit statements run as a report inside the statutory window. Vendor work orders carry the contracted price per unit and turn type, and the vendor's invoice is matched to signed-off units rather than to a summary. Move-in check-in inspections come through the tenant portal and generate the punch-list work orders. The whole cycle runs on the same service request and task management and vendor management that the property uses the rest of the year, which is what makes the August numbers comparable to last August's. See how RIOO supports student housing operators.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What is turn week in student housing?
The period, usually five to seven days in late July or August, in which all expiring leases end, every unit is inspected, cleaned and repaired, and the incoming residents move in. For a 400-bed property it means around 120 units turned in about four days between a Friday move-out and a Wednesday move-in.

Q2. When should planning for turn week start?
In April, when renewals close and the number of beds turning is known. Vendor bids go out in April, contracts and materials are locked in May, staffing is hired in May and June, residents receive move-out instructions in June, and pre-move-out inspections run in July.

Q3. How is damage billed after a student housing turn?
From a per-bedroom and per-common-area move-out inspection with photos, using a published damage price list, with bedroom damage charged to that bed and common-area damage split across the unit's beds by the lease rule. The itemised deposit statement must be issued within the state's statutory deadline, commonly 14 to 30 days after move-out.

Q4. How many vendors and staff does a 400-bed turn need?
As a planning ratio for 120 units over four days: five to eight cleaning crews, six to eight painters, three to four carpet technicians, one maintenance technician per building, eight to ten inspectors on the move-out weekend, and temporary labour for junk removal and move-in day. Replace the ratios with the property's own productivity data after the first year.

Q5. What is the difference between turn week and a normal make-ready?
A normal make-ready is one unit through a fixed trade sequence over a few days. Turn week is that sequence run across every unit in the property in the same four days, which makes it a scheduling, staffing and vendor-capacity problem rather than a maintenance one.

Related reading

• The hidden costs of tenant turnover in student housing
• By-the-bed leasing: how it works, how it's billed
• Apartment make-ready checklist: the five-day unit turn
• Student housing satisfaction: why retention is won or lost in the first 90 days
• Efficient maintenance management for student housing