The $4,000 Email You Forgot to Send

Let me tell you about the most expensive email I’ve ever seen not get sent.

A PM company in Atlanta was managing 240 doors. They tracked lease expirations in a Google Sheet that the office manager updated monthly. In theory, they’d start the renewal process 90 days out. In practice, the sheet got checked when someone remembered to check it, which was usually when a tenant called to ask whether they were getting a renewal offer.

One September, they missed seventeen lease expirations. Not all at once — it happened gradually over three months while the office manager was dealing with a staffing change and a particularly bad stretch of maintenance emergencies. Twelve tenants rolled to month-to-month without renewal discussions. Three gave 30-day notice before anyone reached out. Two had already signed leases at competing properties by the time the PM company realized the leases were expiring.

Five turnovers at $4,000 each: $20,000. The twelve month-to-month tenants who never got a rent increase: roughly $14,400 in foregone annual revenue (assuming a modest $100/month increase they would have accepted). One Google Sheet that nobody checked for three months cost the company over $34,000.

The Renewal Math Nobody Does

Here’s the calculation that every PM company should do but almost none actually complete: the breakeven analysis on rent increases versus turnover costs.

A tenant paying $1,500/month gets a $100/month renewal increase. That’s $1,200/year in additional revenue. If the tenant leaves over the increase, the turnover costs roughly $4,000 (cleaning, repairs, vacancy loss, remarketing), meaning you need 3.3 years to break even on the increased rent — assuming you fill the unit immediately at the higher rate.

But if you approach the renewal conversation 90 days early with market data showing the increase is fair, a personalized message acknowledging their good tenancy, and a straightforward process for accepting, the acceptance rate is dramatically higher than a form letter mailed 30 days before expiration.

The companies I work with that run structured renewal processes — starting at 90-120 days, with market rate analysis, personalized outreach, and systematic follow-up — achieve renewal rates of 70%+. The ones winging it with spreadsheets hover around the national average of 52.5%.

Why Spreadsheet Tracking Fails at Scale

The lease expiration spreadsheet works fine at 30 doors. At 200 doors, it fails for predictable reasons:

Nobody owns it. The spreadsheet exists, but checking it is nobody’s primary responsibility. It’s something the office manager does “when they have time” — which, in property management, is never.

It’s always out of date. Leases get renewed and the spreadsheet doesn’t get updated for weeks. A tenant gives notice and it’s recorded in the PM software but not the spreadsheet. The gap between reality and the spreadsheet grows until the spreadsheet is more misleading than helpful.

It has no context. A spreadsheet shows you that Unit 4B expires March 31. It doesn’t tell you that the tenant has submitted six maintenance requests in the past year, paid late twice, and stopped responding to the last satisfaction survey. All of that context matters for deciding whether to offer a renewal, what terms to offer, and how much effort to put into retention.

It doesn’t trigger action. The spreadsheet sits there passively. Nobody gets an alert when a lease enters the 90-day window. Nobody gets reminded to follow up when a tenant hasn’t responded to a renewal offer. The system relies entirely on someone remembering to look, which is exactly the point of failure that caused the Atlanta company’s $34,000 mistake.

Building the Renewal Pipeline

I think about lease renewals the same way a sales team thinks about their pipeline. You need to know what’s coming, when it’s coming, and what the probability of conversion is. A 200-door portfolio with 12-month leases has roughly 200 renewal opportunities per year — that’s a pipeline that deserves systematic management, not a spreadsheet.

120 days out: Internal review. The system flags upcoming expirations and generates a tenant profile: payment history, maintenance request frequency, communication responsiveness, current rent versus market rate, and lease violation history. This is the data your property manager needs to decide whether to offer a renewal, what terms to offer, and whether this is a tenant worth fighting to keep.

90 days out: First contact. A personalized renewal email goes to the tenant — not a form letter. “Hi Sarah, your lease at 245 Elm Street is coming up for renewal on June 30th. We’ve appreciated your tenancy over the past year — thank you for being a great resident. We’d love to have you stay. Here are the proposed renewal terms…” This email includes the new monthly rent (with market context if there’s an increase), the lease term options, and a simple way to accept or discuss.

75 days out: Follow-up. If no response, a second touchpoint. Adjust the channel — if the first was email, this one might be text. “Just wanted to make sure you saw our renewal offer. Happy to discuss if you have any questions.”

60 days out: Escalation. Non-responsive tenants get a manager call. At this point, you need to know: are they renewing, leaving, or ignoring? If they’re leaving, you need to start the vacancy marketing workflow now to minimize days vacant.

The Renewal-to-Turnover Handoff

Here’s where most PM companies leak time even when they do manage renewals well: the handoff when a tenant declines. The moment a tenant confirms they’re not renewing, a cascade of workflows should trigger automatically:

1. Move-out instructions sent to the tenant (expectations, cleaning standards, key return, deposit timeline)
2. Pre-move-out inspection scheduled
3. Vacancy marketing begins (listing prepared, photos updated, syndication activated)
4. Vendor queue notified (cleaning, painting, carpet — based on unit condition and typical turnover scope)
5. Owner notified with estimated turnover timeline and cost

Without automation, each of these steps is initiated manually by a property manager who’s also handling 15 other tasks. Things get missed. The listing goes up three days after move-out instead of the day of. The cleaning crew isn’t scheduled until a week later. The vacancy stretches from two weeks to four because nobody coordinated the sequence.

What Changes When Renewals Run Themselves

The Atlanta company implemented automated renewal tracking after the $34,000 lesson. Twelve months later, their renewal rate went from 54% to 73%. That’s not because their properties got better or their rents got more competitive. It’s because every tenant received a timely, personalized renewal offer with enough lead time to make a decision — instead of finding out their lease was about to expire when a form letter showed up in their mailbox 28 days before the end date.

The property managers’ time freed up too. Instead of spending hours each month reconciling the spreadsheet, checking PM software, and manually sending renewal letters, they spent that time on the 20% of renewals that actually needed human attention: the tenant who wanted to negotiate, the owner who wanted to sell, the unit where a rent increase would price out a good long-term tenant.

Nineteen percentage points of improved retention, across 240 doors, at $4,000 per avoided turnover — the math speaks for itself.