Feeling the Pain of Higher Resident Turnover? Apartment Junk Removal Can Help

If you’re a property manager, you’ve probably had a significant increase in tenant turnover over the last couple of years. So it’s no wonder apartment junk removal may be top of mind for you right now. There are several reasons for this shift.

For one, the housing market is on fire right now. In 2020 alone, lower interest rates led to 2.38 million Americans leaving their rentals and buying their first homes. But it’s not just the booming housing market causing people to leave their apartments.

Roughly 10% of all Americans have either moved out of their place or had someone move in, mainly due to financial hardship during the pandemic.

During the height of the pandemic, we also witnessed what people have called an “urban exodus,” where more residents were leaving the city and moving to more rural areas. But new trends show, now that the pandemic has stabilized a bit, people are leaving their new apartments and moving back to the cities.

And now that the Supreme Court has lifted the moratorium on evictions, roughly 11 million Americans will be looking for new places to live, so your job as a multifamily residence manager or landlord is about to get a lot harder.

Additional Challenges: Labor Shortages and the Cumbersome Trashout Process

Whether a tenant leaves voluntarily or because of an eviction, the property owner is left with a lot of work on their hands. There are often loads of items and junk that need to be removed before the unit can be cleaned and prepped for a new tenant.

In the case of evictions, property owners must do a complete “trashout,” which is time-intensive and requires a bit of extra precaution, both for the tenant’s sake and for genuine legal reasons.

Generally, the maintenance staff and engineers handle the clean-out and trashout process. But labor shortages paired with the rising increase in unit turnover is making this once routine task increasingly overwhelming.  

In fact, there are nearly 11 million open positions in the United States right now — a record-breaking number of job vacancies. And the multifamily residence sector isn’t exempt from this labor shortage.

For example, one of our customers in multifamily development has 500 job openings right now. We’re seeing our property managers handling 300 units with only two maintenance staff members when they used to have twelve.

With the impending rise in evictions on the horizon, property owners need feasible solutions for apartment junk removal. That’s where junk removal services come into play.

4 Ways Apartment Junk Removal Services Can Help

Hiring an outside company for your trashout and apartment junk removal is a cost-effective and hassle-free way to handle impending evictions and apartment turns.

Here are four of the most significant benefits of choosing a professional junk removal services company for your upcoming apartment clean-outs.

1. Free Up Maintenance Staff: Your maintenance staff is responsible for a lot of things. Adding trashouts to their already busy load isn’t an effective use of their time, especially if you’re facing labor shortages. By hiring a company to handle apartment junk removal, your maintenance staff gets to focus on their primary responsibility: keeping your building running and your current tenants happy.
2. Thorough Documentation: When it comes to evictions, things can get a little messy. By working with a trusted junk removal partner, you often get an inventory list of everything they removed from the apartment. This documentation eliminates issues with tenants claiming lost property after the fact, keeping you protected from unjust lawsuits.
3. Secure Holding Areas: In the case of an eviction trashout, you’re generally required by law to keep a resident’s property available to them for up to 48 hours. In some cases, property owners are forced to leave an entire apartment’s worth of furniture out on the sidewalk. This is not only visually unappealing, but it’s also embarrassing for the tenant. Some of the top apartment junk removal companies will help transfer a tenant’s items to a secure secondary location on-site, alleviating both concerns.
4. Quicker Apartment Turn Time: With limited staff and increased unit turnover, it’s only natural for the process to slow down. But vacant apartments aren’t good for the bottom line. When you choose a professional for junk removal services, you’re expediting the entire process. Generally, companies will come in and remove all the furniture and leave the place broom clean, so your maintenance team just has to do the regular maintenance tasks ahead of a new tenant.

Getting Started with Junk Removal Services

Not all junk removal services are created equally. You want to look for a company with experience in trashout services that can provide documentation, quality service, and additional features, like same-day service and sustainability metrics.

At CheckSammy, we’re experts at apartment junk removal. We help you handle the trashout process swiftly and respectfully. With our 4,000 haulers across North America and proprietary technology, we itemize every item we remove with pictures and documentation. Plus, with our commitment to sustainability, you can rest easy knowing everything we remove is handled sustainably, and that’s verifiable by our authenticated, unalterable data. Contact us today to get started.