An apartment make ready checklist is the ordered list of tasks that takes a unit from the outgoing resident's keys to a signed-off, leasable home: inspection, trash-out, repairs, paint, flooring, cleaning, final walk and release to leasing. Run in the right order with the trades booked in sequence, a standard turn on a conventional unit takes five working days. Run in the wrong order (the cleaner arrives before the painter, the flooring crew arrives before the plumber has finished under the sink), it takes ten, and the difference is vacant days that nobody budgeted. This apartment make ready checklist is laid out as the five-day sequence, with the reason each trade sits where it does, the inspection and punch-list steps that decide whether the unit is ready, the rule for releasing it to leasing, and the turn board that tracks every unit through it. It is the operational counterpart to our earlier post on where the vacant days actually go, which explains why turns drift; this one is ...

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 ...

Student housing guarantor requirements are the conditions a third party, usually a parent, must meet to co-sign a student's lease and become liable for the rent if the student does not pay. A typical policy requires the guarantor to be over a minimum age, to earn a stated multiple of the rent (commonly gross income of four to five times the bed rent, measured monthly or annually), to pass a credit check at a minimum score, and to be a resident of the country where the property sits. Students who cannot produce such a guarantor are offered alternatives: prepayment of the lease term, a larger deposit where state law allows it, or an institutional guarantor service that charges a fee to stand in. This is an operator's guide to setting the policy, handling international students, drafting the guarantor form, screening the guarantor lawfully, and keeping the guarantor on the tenant record so that someone can be reached when the rent stops. It assumes by-the-bed leasing, where each ...

An office service charge budget is the landlord's or managing agent's estimate of the cost of running a multi-let building for the coming service charge year, split into schedules and cost categories, apportioned to each tenant according to their lease, and issued to tenants with explanatory commentary at least one month before the year starts. In the UK the format and process are set by the RICS Professional Statement Service charges in commercial property (1st edition, effective 1 April 2019), which is mandatory for RICS members and firms and is written into most modern office leases as the standard of good practice. Tenants challenge the budget more than any other document the building manager sends. They challenge the total, the apportionment, the management fee, the sinking fund contribution, and anything that looks like an improvement. This guide is about building the budget so that each of those challenges has an answer already in the pack: what the code requires, how to ...

A retail co-tenancy clause gives an in-line tenant a remedy, usually reduced rent or a right to terminate, if a named anchor tenant or a stated percentage of the centre's leasable area stops operating. It exists because a shoe store signs a lease at a mall for the foot traffic the department store brings, and if the department store leaves, the shoe store is paying for a location that no longer exists. One anchor closing can cut the rent on twenty in-line leases at once. The clause in each of those leases decides by how much, for how long, and whether the tenant can leave. This is the clause a mall manager reads the morning the anchor announces closures. Better to have read it before. What a co-tenancy clause is, and why anchors matter Retail rent is priced on traffic. An anchor, whether a department store, a grocer, a big-box or a cinema, draws the customers that the smaller tenants sell to; the in-line tenants pay higher rent per square foot than the anchor precisely because they ...

A utility billing dispute is a tenant's formal challenge to a utility charge on their statement, usually a RUBS allocation or a submeter reading, on the grounds that it's higher than expected, higher than a neighbour's, or not what the lease allows. Most are resolved by showing the tenant the calculation. A written five-step workflow, applied the same way every time, ends roughly eight in ten disputes at step two and turns the rest into a diagnosis rather than an argument. A $61 water charge and a tenant threatening to call the utility commission is the version every property manager recognises. The workflow below is what stops that call from happening, and what makes it survivable if it does. The five-step workflow Step Action Who Deadline Output 1. Log and acknowledge Record the dispute against the tenant and the billing period; send written acknowledgement with the response date Site office Same day Dispute record; acknowledgement 2. Show the calculation Send the master bill, the ...

A RUBS calculation (ratio utility billing system) divides a property's master-metered utility bill among residents by formula rather than by meter. The ratio utility billing formula is: (master bill − common-area deduction) × resident's allocation factor ÷ sum of all allocation factors. The factor can be the unit, the occupants, the square footage, or a blend, and that choice moves a resident's bill by up to 50%. Here is what that looks like on one bill. One $14,000 bill, one resident, four different amounts The building: 120 units, 96,000 rentable square feet, 240 residents on leases. This month's master water and sewer bill is $14,000. After a 10% common-area deduction (explained below), $12,600 is allocable. The resident: a two-bedroom unit, 1,000 sf, three people on the lease. Method Calculation This resident pays vs. per-unit Per unit $12,600 ÷ 120 $105.00 — RUBS by square footage $12,600 × 1,000 ÷ 96,000 $131.25 +25% Hybrid, 50% occupants / 50% sf ($157.50 + $131.25) ÷ 2 $144.38 ...

A RUBS calculation (ratio utility billing system) divides a property's master-metered utility bill among residents by formula rather than by meter. The ratio utility billing formula is: (master bill − common-area deduction) × resident's allocation factor ÷ sum of all allocation factors. The factor can be the unit, the occupants, the square footage, or a blend, and that choice moves a resident's bill by up to 50%. Here is what that looks like on one bill. One $14,000 bill, one resident, four different amounts The building: 120 units, 96,000 rentable square feet, 240 residents on leases. This month's master water and sewer bill is $14,000. After a 10% common-area deduction (explained below), $12,600 is allocable. The resident: a two-bedroom unit, 1,000 sf, three people on the lease. Method Calculation This resident pays vs. per-unit Per unit $12,600 ÷ 120 $105.00 — RUBS by square footage $12,600 × 1,000 ÷ 96,000 $131.25 +25% Hybrid, 50% occupants / 50% sf ($157.50 + $131.25) ÷ 2 $144.38 ...

An expense stop lease is a gross or modified gross lease in which the landlord pays operating expenses up to a fixed amount per square foot, the "stop," and the tenant pays its share of anything above it. A base year lease works the same way, except the stop is set at whatever expenses actually were in the first year of the lease rather than at a negotiated number. In both cases the tenant's rent looks fixed until expenses rise, at which point an escalation invoice arrives and the tenant asks why their "gross" lease has a bill attached. The stop is the number the landlord never wants to explain and the tenant never reads. This post explains it, with the arithmetic. Base year vs expense stop The two mechanisms produce the same kind of invoice and differ in how the threshold is set. Expense stop Base year How the threshold is set Negotiated dollar figure per square foot, written into the lease (e.g. "$8.25 per rentable square foot") The actual operating expenses of the building in the ...

A percentage rent clause is the lease provision that obliges a retail tenant to pay, on top of base rent, a stated percentage of gross sales above a breakpoint. A complete clause has six parts: the rate, the breakpoint, the definition of gross sales, the reporting obligation, the payment mechanics, and the landlord's audit rights. Most disputes come from the third part, because "gross sales" means whatever the lease says it means. Below is a full example clause, then each part taken apart with the wording that matters and the wording that gets landlords into trouble. If you want the maths behind breakpoints, that's covered in how to calculate percentage rent; this post is about the words. One caveat before the clause: this is an illustration for property and leasing teams, not legal advice. Have counsel review any clause before it goes into a lease. The sample percentage rent clause Section 4.3 — Percentage Rent. (a) Obligation: In addition to Base Rent, Tenant shall pay to Landlord, ...