About $67 a day. That is the number, and the rest of this page is just showing the work.
Tampa's average apartment rent was $2,031 a month as of the end of August 2026. Divide by 30.42 days and an empty unit costs $66.77 every day it sits — before the turn costs, before the leasing spend, before the concession you will probably give to fill it.
The national average time to fill a vacant apartment is 41 days. One turn therefore costs about $2,737 in lost rent alone. Tampa is not a national-average market right now — vacancy hit 10.7% in March 2026, the highest since 2000 — so 41 is a generous assumption for a Tampa operator.
Resident turnover at a large Sunbelt operator ran 40.2% in 2025 — and that was described as historically low. Call it 402 turns a year on a thousand doors.
| Portfolio | Turns a year | Rent lost to vacancy | Recovered by 5 fewer days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 doors | 80 | $220,085 | $26,840 |
| 500 doors | 201 | $550,213 | $67,099 |
| 1,000 doors | 402 | $1,100,425 | $134,198 |
| 2,000 doors | 804 | $2,200,851 | $268,396 |
The last column is the one that matters. Nobody is going to take 41 days down to 10. But answering every inquiry inside a minute, booking the tour on the spot, and chasing the ones that went quiet takes days off the average — and five days on a thousand doors is worth about $135,000 a year.
It does not say your portfolio loses this. It says the averages do. If you manage 300 to 3,000 doors in Hillsborough, Pinellas or Pasco, we will run this on your actual inquiry log, read-only, for free, and hand you the result whether or not you ever talk to us again. That takes fifteen minutes to set up.