Vacancy is the expensive part
A unit that sits empty for an extra ten days in Cobb County costs a landlord real money, and most of those ten days are not spent working. They are spent waiting: waiting on a dumpster, waiting on a painter who cannot start until the old tenant’s furniture is gone, waiting on a landscaper who shows up after the photos were already taken.
The order you do things in matters more than how fast any one trade works. Here is the sequence we use on turnovers around Kennesaw, Acworth and Marietta, and why each step sits where it does.
1. Empty it completely before anything else
Nothing else can start while there is a couch in the living room. Whatever the last tenant left behind — furniture, mattresses, half a garage of boxes, the grill on the patio — goes first, in one pass, along with anything already pulled out of closets and cabinets.
Doing this as one job rather than in stages is what keeps the rest of the schedule honest. Painters, flooring crews and cleaners all move faster in an empty unit, and none of them are cheap to have standing around.
2. Walk it with the demo and repair list in hand
With the unit empty you can actually see it. Cabinet doors that will not close, a section of subfloor that flexes, a bathroom vanity that has been wet for longer than anyone admitted. This is the moment to decide what gets repaired and what gets replaced, before a painter has already cut in around it.
It is also the cheapest moment to change your mind. Pulling carpet a day before flooring goes down is a scheduling note. Pulling it after paint is a repaint.
3. Do the messy trades in one block
Demo, drywall, carpentry and anything that makes dust belongs together, before paint and before flooring. Splitting these across two visits is how a unit ends up needing a second clean.
4. Paint, then floors, then fixtures
Paint before flooring, every time. Drop cloths are cheaper than new floors, and cutting in at the baseboard is faster when you are not protecting a finished surface. Fixtures, blinds and hardware go on last so nothing is in the way of a roller.
5. Do the outside while the inside dries
This is the step most turnovers skip, and it is the one that shows up in the listing photos. Front beds that have not been touched in a year, a gutter line packed with pine straw, an overgrown fence line, a side yard the previous tenant used as a storage area.
None of it takes long, and all of it can happen while paint cures. Mulch or pine straw on the front beds, shrubs cut back off the windows, the yard mowed and edged, and a gutter cleaning if it has been a season or more. A prospective tenant decides how they feel about a property from the curb, before they have opened the door.
If the yard has gotten fully away from you between tenants — brush, saplings, a back corner nobody has walked in a year — that is a property cleanup rather than a mow, and it is worth doing once properly instead of three times badly.
6. Clean last, photograph immediately
The final clean happens after every trade is out, not before the last one. Then photograph it the same day, while the beds are fresh and the glass is clean. Photos taken two weeks into a vacancy never look as good as the unit did.
Why we run turnovers with one crew
The sequence above has six handoffs in it. Every handoff is a place where a schedule slips, and coordinating six different contractors is a job in itself — usually the landlord’s job, usually unpaid.
2MT Services handles the hauling, the interior repairs and painting, and the outside work, which collapses most of those handoffs into one schedule we control. We are based in Kennesaw and work across Cobb County, and we give you an itemized written quote before anything starts, so a turnover is a number you can put in a spreadsheet rather than a range you find out at the end.
If you own rentals around Kennesaw, Acworth, Marietta or Woodstock, our investor services page covers how we work with landlords, or you can call or text (470) 332-3398 and we will come look at the unit.