Make-ready is the set of repairs, cleaning, and touch-ups that bring a vacant unit back to rentable condition between one tenant and the next. It is the work that happens after the keys come back and before the next lease starts: paint, carpet cleaning, a deep clean, swapping locks, and fixing whatever broke that nobody mentioned until move-out.
In practice
Say a tenant moves out of a two-bedroom unit on the last day of June and you want it listed by July 7. Your make-ready punch list might look like this: two coats of paint in the living room and hallway at $480, a professional carpet clean at $180, a full unit clean at $150, a sticky garbage disposal replaced at $120, and re-keying the front and back doors at $90. That is $1,020 in make-ready cost for the turn.
Now separate what that money is doing. The paint and the cleaning restore the unit to the condition it was rented in, so they are make-ready repairs you deduct in the year you pay them. The garbage disposal is a small replacement that, under the de minimis rules, you can also expense rather than depreciate. If instead you had pulled all the carpet and laid new luxury vinyl plank for $3,400, that piece would not be a make-ready repair at all. It is a replacement with a useful life of years, so it gets capitalized and depreciated. Same week, same vacant unit, two different tax treatments.
Why it matters to a small landlord
Make-ready is where a vacancy quietly gets expensive. Every day the unit sits in make-ready is a day with no rent coming in, so the budget question and the calendar question are the same question. The other place it bites is at tax time: if you lump a $3,400 floor replacement in with $1,020 of genuine repairs and call the whole thing “turnover expense,” you have misstated your Schedule E. Knowing which line each dollar belongs on is the difference between a clean year and a guess. The classification rules are worked through in repairs vs improvements on a rental, and the cost and process of the whole turn, not just the make-ready slice, are laid out in what tenant turnover really costs.
One habit makes make-ready far less painful: photograph and itemize the condition before and after, the same way you would for a deposit. That record tells you which costs were the departing tenant's responsibility and which were yours to absorb, which is exactly the line drawn in the security deposit paper trail.
Make-ready sits inside the larger work of a turnover, and it lives right on the border between normal wear and tear you eat and a capital expenditure you depreciate. Get those three apart in your head and the bill in front of you mostly sorts itself.