Landlord turnover cleanouts in San Francisco

Why San Francisco turnovers are bigger than turnovers elsewhere

Rent control changes the shape of this job completely. In most markets a rental turns over every year or two and the outgoing tenant leaves a few items. Here, a stabilized unit can hold the same household for decades — and what comes out of it at the end is not a move-out, it is a lifetime.

The pattern is consistent across the city:

• Furniture bought for this specific flat. Sized to a Victorian doorway or a particular bay window, and not worth moving anywhere else.
• Storage overflow into the garage. The ground-floor garage under the units becomes the building's attic, and after twenty years nobody can say whose boxes are whose.
• Appliances the tenant installed. A washer wedged into a hall cupboard, a mini fridge in a back room, an air conditioner from one hot September.
• Damp damage. Anything stored at garage level has been through years of fog and a concrete slab. It is not salvageable and pretending otherwise slows the job down.

The other common variant is the small owner: a two-to-four unit building, owner-occupied or family-held, where the person doing the turnover is not a property company with a crew but one person with a day job.

Deal with abandoned property properly first

Before anything is carried out, be clear about whose it is.

California has a legal process for personal property left behind by a departing tenant, and it involves notice and a waiting period rather than an immediate clearance. The details matter and they are not ours to summarize — get the current requirements from your attorney or a landlord association before you book a truck. Getting it wrong on a unit where the tenancy ended badly is an expensive mistake.

What we will not do is clear an occupied unit, or a unit where the occupant has not agreed to the work, on someone else's say-so. If there is any ambiguity about possession, resolve it first.

Where the tenancy has ended cleanly and the unit is genuinely surrendered, none of this applies and the job is simply a clearance.

What it costs

Turnovers are usually priced on truck fill, because itemizing a whole unit is not a good use of anyone's afternoon. The ladder is published and it does not move:

Calibration from San Francisco jobs: a studio or one-bedroom after a short tenancy is often a half truck at $431. A one-bedroom after a long tenancy is a full truck at $732. A two-bedroom flat with a garage share behind it is regularly two loads at $732 + $732 = $1,464.

Where the unit is nearly empty and only a few things remain, item pricing is cheaper. Common leftovers: Sofa $126, Mattress + Box Spring Set $143, Dresser (Standard) $126, Washer $133, Dryer $128, Refrigerator (Standard) $164, Large Junk Pile $208, Medium Junk Pile $129. The visit minimum is $95.

Two worked turnovers:

• Studio, short tenancy, Tenderloin. Mattress and box spring set, a sofa and a medium junk pile: $143 + $126 + $129 = $398.
• One-bedroom, tenant left the appliances, Inner Richmond. Standard refrigerator, washer, dryer and a large junk pile: $164 + $133 + $128 + $208 = $633.

Vacancy is the real cost

Every day the unit is not listable is a day of lost rent, and in this market that number is not small. It is worth being blunt about the arithmetic: the clearance is a one-off cost and the vacancy is a running one. Optimize for the running one.

Which means: book the clearance for the day the keys come back, not the week after. Have it in the diary before the tenancy ends. If the unit needs painting or a floor sanded, the clearance has to happen first and every trade behind it is waiting on you.

The sequence that works: keys back on the Friday, clearance Monday morning, decorators Tuesday, photographs Thursday, listed that weekend. The sequence that does not work is deciding on the Monday to see whether you can manage it yourself over a couple of weekends.

The building constraints to plan around

The stair. Upper-flat units mean a full flight, a landing turn and a half-flight to the street. Carry-out from any floor is included in our prices — there is no stair charge and no walk-up fee — but it does mean these are half-day jobs rather than hour-long ones, and it means a one-person attempt is a bad idea.

The other tenants. In a two-to-four unit building the stair is shared. A clearance blocks it intermittently for a few hours. Give your other tenants a day's notice; it costs nothing and prevents the complaint.

The street. One-way blocks, steep grades where a truck cannot reverse to correct, posted street-cleaning windows, and residential permit zones that tolerate loading but not an all-day park. Tell us the cross street and the cleaning schedule when you book. It does not change the price; it changes the arrival slot and it keeps your neighbors out of it.

The garage. If the unit had garage storage, look before you book. It is almost always more than anyone expects and it is the part that turns a half-truck job into a full-truck one.

What to keep, and what to stop pretending about

Owners often want to salvage furniture for the next tenant or for a furnished listing. Sometimes that is right. The honest filter:

• Solid wood in good condition — worth keeping or donating.
• Appliances that work and are under about ten years old — worth keeping. Test them rather than assuming.
• Anything upholstered from a long tenancy — no. It will not survive an inspection by a prospective tenant and it will cost you more in perception than it saves in money.
• Anything from the garage — no. Fog and a concrete slab have already decided this.
• Mattresses — no, and they are not donatable either.

A clean, empty flat lets faster and at a better number than a flat with someone else's sofa in it. That is worth more than the removal price on almost every unit in this city.

Booking it as a landlord rather than a resident

Three things that make repeat turnovers easier:

• Give us the address history. If we have cleared a unit in your building before, we already know the stair, the street and where the truck goes.
• Sort the certificate of insurance once. If the building is managed or HOA-run and requires a certificate naming the management company, get that on file rather than re-requesting it every turnover.
• Book on the calendar, not on the phone. Turnovers have known dates weeks in advance. A slot booked early is a slot at the time you want, which for San Francisco means a weekday morning before the street fills up.

And the price is the price: written before dispatch, disposal included, stairs included. You can put it in a budget and it will still be right on the day.

Frequently asked questions