How much rent are you losing to vacancy?

Most owners think of vacancy as a market problem. It's almost always an execution problem. Markets set the ceiling on rent and the floor on demand, but the gap between move-out and move-in is set by pricing decisions, listing quality, response time, and how parallel your turn work is. Those are all levers you control. A property that sits 45 days between tenants in a market where comparable units lease in 14 is losing more rent than any single line item on the operating statement.

Vacancy compounds in two ways. Physical vacancy is the obvious one: every empty day is a day of zero rent. Economic vacancy is the quiet killer. It includes concessions to fill the unit, partial months lost to mid-month move-ins, bad-debt write-offs, and rent loss from below-market pricing on renewals. Add them together and most portfolios run an effective vacancy 2 to 4 points higher than what they report.

The three levers that move the number are pricing (matching live comps, not last year's lease), marketing and response speed (high-quality photos, complete listings, same-day reply on inquiries), and turn speed (pre-listing during the turn, parallel scopes for paint and clean and repairs). This calculator helps you size the prize so you know which lever is worth pulling first.