What Is a Make-Ready Unit?

MU, and what it is doing on your board

MU is shorthand for make-ready unit. It usually appears as a status beside a unit number: the resident has moved out, the keys are back, and the unit is somewhere between vacated and rent-ready. It cannot be shown and it cannot be leased, which is the gap occupancy reports exist to measure.

Some offices write MR instead, and some use MU for the make-ready work rather than the unit holding it. Both are common. If you are reporting numbers off that column, it is worth checking what your own software means by the abbreviation before anyone makes a decision from the total.

Turn, make-ready, punch list

Three words that get used interchangeably. When the difference matters, they separate like this:

• The turn is the work. It is the activity between one resident leaving and the next one moving in.
• The make-ready is the condition. It is the standard the unit has to meet when the turn is finished.
• The punch list is what is left at the end. The chips, the touch-ups, the door that sticks, the outlet cover that never went back on.

You turn a unit, the unit is then make-ready, and the punch list is how you prove it. Watch the punch list. When items that belong to the original scope keep turning up at the end, the walk at the start was not detailed enough, and that is the usual reason a turn slips a week.

Standard turn or heavy make-ready

Two units can both be marked MU and be completely different jobs.

A standard turn is paint, patch and drywall repair, a full clean, blind and hardware replacement, appliance and fixture checks, the re-key, and the punch list. A heavy make-ready is all of that plus flooring, countertops, cabinet or vanity replacement, and whatever the last resident damaged past normal wear.

The gap between those two scopes is most of the cost and most of the calendar. A standard turn runs 1 to 3 days per unit. A heavy make-ready with flooring, countertops and real punch-list work typically runs 5 to 7 days. If a schedule was built on the first number and the unit turns out to be the second, the leasing date moves and you find out late.

Why a per-unit bid beats a flat turn price

Nobody can tell which of those two jobs a unit is without walking it. A flat turn price quoted sight-unseen has to handle that uncertainty somehow, and there are only two ways to do it: price every unit as if it were heavy, or price them all light and recover the difference in change orders once the crew is inside.

We walk each unit, photograph the condition and confirm the scope before the bid goes out. The per-unit number you get back is the number you pay, and the photographs are what make that hold up when a scope is questioned three weeks later.

The paperwork is part of the job

Finishing the work is only part of closing a turn. Most property management companies need a certificate of insurance on file before a vendor is on site, photo documentation of each unit, punch-list signoff, and invoices in a format their system accepts.

We carry General Liability and Workers’ Compensation and provide certificates on request. Every turn is photographed for your file, and invoicing is set up to flow into the vendor systems property management companies already use rather than landing on someone’s desk as a manual workaround.

One more term: rent-ready

Rent-ready and make-ready mean the same thing in most San Antonio offices. Where they are used differently, make-ready describes the physical condition of the unit and rent-ready describes its status in the system: inspected, signed off, released to leasing and showable today. A unit can be physically finished and still not be rent-ready, because the sign-off walk has not happened. When two reports disagree about how many units are available this week, that is usually the reason.