This case study is anonymized. No property, owner, or company names are used, and details are simplified for readability. It describes the kind of work we do every day for owners of larger rental properties.
A 90-unit apartment community in Eastern Ontario, a solid building in a good location that had drifted. When we took over management, 10 units sat empty, an 11% vacancy rate in a market where well-run buildings were effectively full. Every empty month on those units was income the owner would never get back.
Nothing dramatic was wrong, which is exactly why it had gone unaddressed. The listings used dated photos and flat descriptions. Rents had not been reviewed by unit type in years, so some units were priced above what the market would bear while others were leaving money on the table. Turnovers between residents were slow: a unit could sit for three or four weeks waiting on cleaning, paint, and small repairs before it could even be shown. Applications took days to process, and good applicants moved on to faster landlords.
Eight months later the community sat at 2% vacancy, two units in normal turnover rather than ten sitting idle. Collected rent rose accordingly, and the owner now reads a clear monthly statement in a couple of minutes instead of wondering what is happening on site.
Chronic vacancy is rarely one big problem. It is usually several small, fixable ones: tired marketing, unexamined pricing, slow turnovers, and slow paperwork. A manager who fixes all of them at once changes the trajectory of the building quickly.
KEILTY manages multi-family communities across 26 Ontario cities, with flat-rate pricing and clear monthly reporting. See our property management services, or if you own 10 or more units, request a portfolio consultation on any of our city pages and a senior manager will contact you directly. Prefer to talk? Call 613-545-3322.
