Landlord turnover cleanouts in Houston

The short answer

Volume pricing, agreed in advance. Quarter truck $241, three-eighths $338, half $431, five-eighths $513, three-quarters $587, seven-eighths $661, full truck $732. Minimum $75 per visit.

Typical Houston turns: a one-bedroom left with a bed and a sofa lands at the quarter to three-eighths tier. A two-bedroom abandoned with everything in it is usually five-eighths to a full truck. A single-family rental with a garage can be two loads.

Houston turns faster than most markets

This is one of the largest rental markets in the country and one of the least constrained. Supply keeps coming — no zoning, continuous construction inside the Loop and out along the Grand Parkway — so tenants move laterally for a better deal far more freely than they do in a market with a hard supply ceiling. Turnover is high and it is normal.

What that means operationally is that your days-vacant number matters more than your cleanout unit cost. A crew that shows up when it said it would, at a price you already knew, is worth more than a cheaper crew that turns a two-day gap into a nine-day one.

The three property types and what each costs to turn

Garden-style complexes — Gulfton, Sharpstown, Alief, Spring Branch, the Southwest Freeway corridor. Two and three storys, exterior stairs, breezeways, a gated dumpster enclosure nobody can get a sofa through. There is no stair charge, so the quote is purely about volume.

Single-family rentals — all over the county, a lot of them slab-on-grade ranch houses. These come with a garage and often a shed, and the garage is where the last three tenants' leftovers are. Quote the garage separately in your head; it is frequently more volume than the house.

Townhomes and mid-rises — Rice Military, EaDo, Midtown, the Washington corridor, Upper Kirby. Stairs, tight landings, sometimes a freight lift and a certificate of insurance required by building management. We carry that.

Abandoned units and the storage period

Texas landlords have obligations around a tenant's remaining property, and those obligations are legal, not logistical — get them from your attorney or your association, not from a junk removal company. What we can do is fit the removal around whatever timetable you are working to, including holding the visit until your notice period has run.

We will also photograph the unit as found and as cleared, which is the documentation you actually want in a file if a deposit is ever disputed.

What a turn usually contains

A standard one-bedroom turn: sofa, queen set, metal frame, medium pile — $126 + $143 + $68 + $129 = $466. That is above the half-truck tier at $431, so we quote the half truck and you pay the lower number.

Flood-damaged units

If a ground-floor unit has taken water, the job changes shape. Carpet and pad come out, anything porous goes, and the sooner it happens the less remediation costs you afterwards — mold gets established fast in this climate and waiting a week is expensive.

Carpet removal is $71 a room and rolled carpet is $68. Drywall cut out to the flood line is $37 a sheet or small bundle. Those are line items on the same quote, not a separate emergency rate.

Working with us at portfolio scale

Quote from photographs. Price fixed before dispatch. No on-site renegotiation. Certificate of insurance on file for buildings that require one. Before-and-after photographs on every job. Invoicing that your bookkeeper can match to a unit number.

If you run several properties across the metro, tell us which ones and we will keep the access notes — gate codes, loading-bay hours, which complexes require a lift reservation — so the second job is faster than the first.

Frequently asked questions