Turnover gets measured in a lot of ways: lost rent, marketing spend, maintenance hours. One cost that rarely makes the spreadsheet is what happens to utilities while a unit sits empty.
The Math Behind an Invisible Cost
Nationally, apartments sit vacant an average of 34.4 days between residents, according to RealPage market analytics, and the annual turnover rate across multifamily portfolios runs 40-50%, per the National Apartment Association. Turn cost itself, repairs, marketing, leasing commissions, and lost rent, typically lands around $3,872 to $4,000 per unit, based on industry benchmarks reported by Multifamily Dive and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.
That's the cost everyone already tracks. What doesn't usually make it into that number: HVAC systems, lighting, and other utility draws that keep running during those 34-plus vacant days, with no resident there to absorb the charge and no one actively monitoring it.
Why This Slips Through
Vacant unit utilities fall into a gap most billing processes aren't built to catch. RUBS allocations are typically calculated based on occupancy, so a vacant unit either gets left out of the split or, worse, quietly gets absorbed into the property's own operating costs. Either way, nobody's actively watching the meter on a unit with no one living in it.
Multiply that gap by a 40-50% annual turnover rate across a full portfolio, and it stops being a rounding error.
Where It Shows Up
A few common patterns during turnover:
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HVAC left running. Heating or cooling systems often stay on through the full turnover window, sometimes at move-in-ready settings, sometimes simply because no one turned them off.
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Lighting and outlets left active. Common in units being shown to prospective residents or mid-renovation.
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No active monitoring. Without a system flagging vacant-unit consumption specifically, usage during turnover just blends into the property's overall utility bill, unattributed and unrecovered.
Turning This Into Something You Can Actually Track
The good news: this doesn't have to stay invisible. Vacant-unit utility usage is trackable, and once it's visible, it's recoverable, the same way any other billing gap can be identified and closed.
The Bigger Picture
Turnover is never going away, 40-50% of a portfolio turning over every year is simply the nature of multifamily housing. But the utility waste that rides along with it doesn't have to be an accepted cost. With the right visibility into vacant-unit consumption, one of the more overlooked costs of turnover becomes one of the easier ones to recover.
Livable helps you track utility costs through every stage of turnover, so nothing slips through unnoticed. Schedule a Discovery Call to see how.
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