The 4-Week Plan to Lock In Your Summer Turn Season Now

It's the second week of May. The leasing team just dropped a stack of move-out notices on your desk for the next 30 days. Your paint vendor is booked through June. The flooring crew you usually call has a three-week wait. That conversation you didn't have in April? It would have changed everything.

In Texas multifamily, May through August is when 60 to 70 percent of your turn volume hits. The properties that turn fast in June are the ones that locked everything down in April. The ones that wait until May pay for it — in rush fees, missed move-in dates, and average turn times that quietly drift past acceptable.

Why April decides your summer

A typical 200-unit Texas property carries dozens of turns in May alone. Every day a trade slot slips is another day of vacancy revenue lost. Across a full peak season, under-prepped operators routinely lose more than a week of average turn time before they realize what's happening.

The complexity scales with how many vendors you're coordinating. A property running five separate vendors — one for paint, one for flooring, one for resurfacing, one for HVAC, one for carpet — is running five parallel lockdown conversations every week of April. The properties that lock down fastest run a single-source partner that covers every trade in the make-ready scope under one calendar, one point of contact, one schedule.

The good news is that the prep itself isn't complicated. It's a four-week sequence with one focused job per week. Done in April, it sets the operating posture for the whole summer.

Week 4 — Confirm vendor capacity

Four weeks before May 1, lock in your trade calendars. Not loose commitments — actual dates, units, scope, and per-trade hours.

• Send a 90-day rolling forecast to every vendor partner with anticipated unit counts by week

• Get written capacity confirmation per trade (paint, flooring, resurfacing, HVAC, punch)

• Identify your single point of contact at each vendor and confirm coverage during summer holidays

• Flag any sub-market mismatches — an Austin-only crew can't backfill a Dallas peak

The vendors who won't give you written capacity in April are the ones who will ghost you in June. Catch them now, while there is still time to add a backup partner.

Week 3 — Build the make-ready calendar

Pull every lease expiration and every 60-day notice for May, June, and July. Layer them onto a single calendar — visible to the leasing team, the maintenance team, and your vendor partners. Color-code by week.

This is where you see the pile-ups. A 12-unit move-out cluster on the third Friday of June will tell you exactly which trades need extra capacity that week. It also tells leasing where to push renewals to spread the load.

The Make Ready Board, or whichever dashboard you run, should reflect this calendar by April 20. If it doesn't, you're flying blind into peak.

Week 2 — Roll out pre-move-out inspections

The pre-move-out inspection is the single highest-leverage move in any turn workflow. A walk-through 7 days before the tenant leaves catches scope items early, lets you order materials before keys come back, and flags damage disputes while there is still time to document.

Train the leasing team on the form. Set the photo standard. If you don't have a form built, the 200-point digital make-ready checklist 360 uses with clients is a starting reference — the categories your form needs to cover are paint, doors and hardware, plumbing fixtures, electrical, appliances, flooring, cleaning, and safety items.

Get the first batch of pre-move-out scopes done by the last week of April so May tenant moves arrive with the scope already locked. The shift from post-move-out scoping to pre-move-out scoping is the single change that produces the biggest immediate gain in turn time.

Week 1 — Run the dispatch dry-run

The week before May 1, run your dispatch process on a 10-unit sample. Not a real turn — a simulation. Walk through every step: notice triggers scope, scope triggers materials, materials trigger crew assignment, crew arrives with kit, work completes, walk-through closes the loop.

What breaks in the dry-run is what would have broken in May. Fix it now.

Lock the season before it locks you

The 4-week lockdown isn't a 360 process. It's an operating posture. We help our clients run it because we run it ourselves — across hundreds of make-readys every month at peak, covering every trade in the turn scope under one schedule.

That's the founding idea behind 360: property managers shouldn't have to chase vendors. One call should do it all. If your April calendar still has open slots, this is the week. Talk to your account manager — or to ours — and lock the season before May runs you over.