A managing agent I have worked with for years described the gap between tenants as the only week of the year the property is honest with you. Nobody is living in it, nothing is hidden behind furniture, and every job costs less because there is no access to arrange and nobody to work around.
Most owners waste it. The keys come back, the clean gets booked, the new lease starts nine days later and the only thing that got done was the carpets.
Walk it before the clean, not after
The clean hides things. Do the walkthrough while the place still looks lived in, because that is when you can see what actually wore out rather than what looks tired under fresh vacuum lines.
Take the previous condition report with you and work off it. It is the document the bond claim gets argued against, and it also happens to be a decent maintenance checklist, because it forces you to look at every room in the same order rather than wandering.
Two things I look for that owners generally do not. Doors, because a door that has dropped or sticks gets flagged at the ingoing inspection every single time and takes ten minutes to fix while the house is empty. And the wet areas, because silicone and grout are the items that quietly fail over a two-year tenancy and are cheap now and expensive later.
What agents flag, in roughly the order they flag it
The ingoing inspection is a photo exercise, and the photographs get taken in a particular order. Marks on walls first. Then anything broken or missing — a blind that will not raise, a cupboard door off its hinge, a missing flyscreen. Then the wet areas. Then the outside.
None of that is expensive individually. It becomes expensive because each one turns into a separate maintenance request three weeks into the tenancy, at which point you are paying a call-out for a job that would have taken part of an afternoon during the vacancy. That batching is most of the value in property maintenance work, and it is why we would rather come once with a list than five times with a single item each.
Flyscreens are the standout. They are the most-reported item on ingoing reports and among the cheapest things in the building to fix.
Patch and paint, or repaint
The default assumption is that a rental needs repainting at every turnover. It usually does not.
Patch and paint works when the wall colour is still current, you have the tin, and the marks are localised — scuffs along a hallway, a few picture hook holes, the mark behind where a bedhead sat. Touch-ups blend on flat and low-sheen walls if the paint has not been on there so long that it has yellowed off-white.
It stops working when the marks are general rather than local. Once you are patching more than a few spots per wall, the patches read as patches, and you have spent half a repaint to get a wall that looks worse than either option. Same story if the previous tenant hung anything heavy, because plaster repairs never disappear under a touch-up.
The other trigger is a colour change. If the place is still the beige it was painted in 2009, a repaint in something current does more for the rent than most other things you could spend the same money on. Our painting work on rentals is mostly this: full repaint every second or third turnover, touch-ups in between.
The small stuff that has a deadline
Some items are not really optional. Smoke alarms have their own compliance regime in NSW and sit outside general maintenance — that is a landlord obligation with dates attached, and the NSW guidance on getting repairs done sets out how urgent repairs work once someone is living there.
The rest of the list is the ordinary stuff: sticking doors, loose handles, blinds and cords, gates and latches, a clothesline that has sagged, gap-filling where the skirting has pulled away. It is exactly the handyman list, done in one visit while nobody is home, and it is the cheapest maintenance you will do all year.
What we cannot touch
Anything electrical, plumbing, drainage, gas or air conditioning needs a licensed trade in NSW with no dollar threshold at all. That includes plenty of turnover-shaped jobs: a dripping tap, a light fitting the last tenant broke, a rangehood that has stopped. We do not do them and we do not know a way around it, so we flag them and you get the right person in. The licensing thresholds post explains where the line falls and why the $5,000 rule does not apply to those trades.
Everything else on the list is general trade work, and the window to do it properly is short. If you have a vacancy coming up, send us the last condition report and we will price against it rather than guess. Get in touch with the dates and we will work back from the lease start.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0450 959 936.