Last year one of my units sat empty for 41 days between tenants, and when I finally added up the lost rent, the utilities I kept paying with nobody living there, and the move-in discount I offered to get someone to sign fast, that single vacancy had cost me about 187,000 yen more than I expected. For most of my 15 years as a landlord I only tracked the obvious number: rent lost while a unit sat empty. It took a bad stretch across three of my 9 properties in the same season to make me realize that number was maybe 60% of the real cost.
Now I track vacancy costs the same way I track renovation budgets, with a simple spreadsheet and five categories instead of one. It sounds like extra paperwork, but it takes about 10 minutes per turnover and it has completely changed how I decide when to spend money speeding up a re-let versus when to just wait.
The Five Cost Buckets I Actually Track
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When a unit goes vacant, I stopped thinking of it as one lump number and started breaking it into pieces that each behave differently. Here is the checklist I run through for every vacancy now:
- Lost rent, calculated per day, not per month
- Utilities I keep paying (electricity for lockboxes and lighting, water for cleaning, sometimes gas for showings)
- Turnover work: cleaning, repainting, and what is called genjo kaifuku here, restoring the unit to its original condition
- Marketing costs: listing fees, photos, and any agent commission for finding the next tenant
- Incentives to close faster, like a half-month discount or waived key money
Once I started logging all five, I found that turnover repairs and cleaning were often larger than the rent I lost. On a typical 1K unit renting for 58,000 yen a month, a 30-day vacancy loses about 58,000 yen in rent, but a full repaint plus flooring touch-up can run 90,000 to 140,000 yen depending on how the previous tenant treated the place.
How I Calculate a Daily Vacancy Cost
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The habit that changed everything was switching from monthly thinking to daily thinking. I take the monthly rent, divide by 30, and that becomes my baseline daily bleed. For a 72,000 yen unit, that is 2,400 yen a day in rent alone. Then I add roughly 150 to 300 yen a day for utilities I am still covering. So before I have spent a single yen on repairs, an empty unit is already costing me around 2,700 yen every single day it sits open.
That daily number is what pushed me to stop treating a slow contractor or a lazy listing as a minor inconvenience. If a cleaning crew can finish in 2 days instead of the 6 days it would take me working evenings after my day job, that is 4 extra days of vacancy avoided, worth about 10,800 yen in rent alone, easily covering their fee.
The Spreadsheet I Use (Nothing Fancy)
I keep one row per vacancy with columns for move-out date, move-in date, days vacant, rent amount, utility cost, turnover cost, marketing cost, and any incentive given. At the end I have a total yen cost per vacancy and a cost-per-day figure. Nothing about this needs special software; I built mine in a basic spreadsheet in about 20 minutes, and I have kept it running for over 3 years now across all 9 properties.
Having every vacancy in one place also let me compare properties honestly for the first time. One older building I own averages 34 days vacant per turnover, while a unit I fully renovated four years ago averages just 12 days. That gap alone is worth roughly 52,800 yen per turnover in lost rent, which told me exactly where my next renovation budget should go.
What Two Years of Data Taught Me
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Once I had real numbers instead of gut feeling, a few patterns showed up fast. Units priced even 3% above the neighborhood average sat vacant nearly twice as long. Listings without a floor plan photo took an average of 9 extra days to fill. And turnovers where I tried to do every repair myself, rather than hiring help for the time-sensitive parts, added an average of 11 days compared to turnovers where I paid for outside labor on at least the cleaning and painting.
None of that means I stopped doing DIY work. It means I now DIY the parts that do not block move-in day, like fixing a cabinet hinge or touching up trim after a tenant is already living there, and I pay for speed on the parts that keep the unit empty.
When Paying More Upfront Actually Saves Money
The clearest example from my logs: a cleaning and paint job that cost 38,000 yen from a local crew saved me 9 days of vacancy on a 65,000 yen a month unit, which works out to about 19,500 yen in avoided rent loss plus a faster listing that attracted a tenant willing to sign at full asking rent. Doing it myself would have saved that 38,000 yen upfront but likely cost far more in the days added.
I run this same rough math before every turnover now: multiply my daily vacancy cost by the number of days a service would save me, then compare that to what the service costs. If the math favors paying, I pay. If it does not, I do the work myself on a weekend.
That is the approach I use across all 9 of my properties, and it is the single habit that has done the most to shrink my vacancy losses over the last two years.
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15 years of landlord experience u00b7 3 apartment buildings u00b7 DIY renovations that saved millions of yen. Browse all articles at diytosan.com
