Quarterly numbers
What the big landlords just told the SEC about turnover
Twice a year we read the filings of the two biggest single-family landlords in America, because they are legally required to tell the truth about costs the rest of us only guess at. The mid-2026 reports are out. Here is what they say, in plain numbers.
Invitation Homes owns about 77,000 same-store rental houses. AMH runs about 54,000 in its comparable pool. When they report what upkeep and turnover cost, it is audited, sworn, and filed with the SEC. No landlord forum thread comes with that guarantee.
Number oneUpkeep ran $974 per home, in one quarter
AMH's closest version of the same figure was $780 per property for the quarter. Note what these are not: they are not the cost of one turnover. They are the whole portfolio's quarterly repair-and-turn bill spread across every home, occupied or not. And they are the numbers of operators with in-house crews and bulk pricing. A small landlord paying retail for the same work should expect to run higher, not lower.
The seasonality is right in the series: Invitation Homes' worst quarter of the last five was the third quarter of 2025, at $1,137 per home, because summer is when residents move. If your reserve account is flat across the year, it is wrong twice a year in opposite directions.
Number two46 days empty between residents, and rising
Invitation Homes told the SEC that in the second quarter a home "remained unoccupied on average for 46 and 40 days between residents" comparing 2026 with 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 it was 61 days, the worst the company has ever disclosed. The clock runs from the old resident's move-out to the new resident getting keys, so it counts the turn work, the marketing, and the leasing lag together.
At their average rent of about $2,480 a month, six and a half weeks of empty house is roughly $3,800 of rent that never existed. That is the real cost of a turnover, and it dwarfs the cleaning and paint. Every day you shave off the gap between residents is worth about $80 at their rent level, and proportionally the same at yours.
Number threeA quarter of homes turn over every year
Invitation Homes' annualized turnover rate was 22.8 percent for the quarter. AMH reported 27.3 percent over the trailing twelve months. Round both to the same sentence: about one door in four turns each year, even at operators whose whole business is keeping residents in place. Budgeting as if your tenant will stay forever is not optimism, it is a missing line item.
The thing worth copying is not the numbers
It is the bookkeeping. These companies can tell an investor, to the dollar, what turnover expense versus turnover capital spending was, per home, per quarter, with resident reimbursements netted out. Most small landlords cannot say what their last turnover cost within five hundred dollars, because the paint went into "repairs," the empty weeks went nowhere, and the damage that should have been billed to the departing tenant was never photographed.
You do not need an accounting department to copy the structure. Four lines per turnover, kept in a spreadsheet: days empty, cleaning and make-ready spend, repair spend, and what you recovered from the deposit. Do that for a year and you will know your own version of every number in this article, and which of the three is eating your margin. The big operators' filings suggest where to look first: it is almost never the cleaning bill. It is the days.
Sources
- Invitation Homes, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and Q2 2026 earnings supplemental, filed with the SEC, sec.gov.
- AMH (American Homes 4 Rent), Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and Q2 2026 earnings supplemental, filed with the SEC, sec.gov.