Nights, weekends, every channel. The question gets a real answer, the tour gets booked, and you get a weekly report of inquiries, tours and leases per property.
It sits beside AppFolio, Buildium, Rentvine, Propertyware and Rent Manager. It does not replace them and it never touches your ledger.
Cross-checked two ways. The Tampa arithmetic — $67 a day × 402 turns × 41 days — lands at $1.10M, within 17% of the national figure. Sources are listed at the bottom of this page.
Tampa apartment vacancy, March 2026. The highest since 2000.
of Tampa listings carried a concession in June 2026, against 39.7% nationally.
Tampa Bay management companies we surveyed publish no after-hours contact of any kind.
Start with leasing. The rest follows once the first property is running and you have seen the numbers move.
Every inquiry — listing sites, your website form, text, voicemail — gets a real answer inside a minute, with the rent, the availability and the pet policy your system actually says. Then it offers two tour times.
The 6pm-to-9am window where renters actually search and nobody is at the desk. Emergencies route to your on-call person. Everything else is handled or queued with an answer already sent.
Reach every resident on a clock before the notice window closes. A renewal costs a fraction of a turn, and the ones you lose are usually the ones nobody called.
Take the request, ask the three questions your tech always has to call back about, and put a complete ticket in your system instead of a voicemail.
The owner leads that arrive at 9pm and go cold by morning. Same desk, same minute, routed to whoever signs new doors.
It is one job done properly. If a feature does not put a tour on your calendar or a signature on a renewal, it does not get built.
A vacant unit in Tampa burns about $67 every day it sits. At 40.2% turnover, a thousand doors turn roughly 402 times a year, and the average vacant apartment takes 41 days to fill.
You do not need to fix all 41. Taking five days off the average recovers around $135,000 a year on a thousand doors. That is the entire argument.
And it is not a theory about responsiveness in general. In one quarter, 60.8% of 170,825 calls placed to apartment communities went unanswered.
Our industry is full of statistics with no source behind them. These are the ones we deliberately do not use, even though they would help us:
Every figure on this page has a source at the bottom, with the date we read it.
We would rather show you your own numbers than argue about ours.
The Vacancy Desk is run by Mike Sohibe. He owns two phone repair stores in Tampa — on Fowler and on Busch — where the whole business is answering people quickly and not losing the ones who walk in at closing time.
This started as research into the Tampa Bay rental market and turned into something worth building: vacancy at a 26-year high, half the listings discounting, and almost nobody reachable after five.
We are early and we would rather say so. The first property managers who work with us get the pilot free and get a real say in what gets built, because what they tell us is worth more right now than what they would pay us.
Tell us roughly how many doors you manage and where your inquiries land today. That is enough to start.
Serving Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties. If you are outside Tampa Bay, write anyway and say where — we are keeping a list.