[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER] Hero background — finished apartment unit, wide shot
Services · Apartment Painting
Apartment Painting in Jacksonville, FL
We paint apartment units for property managers across Jacksonville — vacant turns, occupied units, common areas and full communities. Fixed price per unit type, agreed at the walk. Patches sanded, plates pulled, photos of every unit, punch-ready handoff. Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties.
Insured · COI and W-9 within 24 hours · Crews we employ
Fixed Per Unit
Priced by unit type, not by the hour.
2–3 Day Turns
Vacant units back on the market fast.
Occupied Or Vacant
Scheduled around residents when needed.
Photos Every Unit
Before and after, attached to your invoice.
Scope
What “apartment painting” means depends who’s asking
For a homeowner, painting is a project. For a property manager it’s a recurring operational cost with a deadline attached, and the scope changes depending on where the unit sits in its lifecycle.
We handle four distinct kinds of work, and they’re priced and scheduled differently:
| Type | When | What’s Involved |
|---|---|---|
| Vacant unit turns | Between residents | Full interior — walls, ceilings, trim, doors, closets. The critical-path item in a make-ready. |
| Occupied unit painting | Mid-tenancy | Scheduled through leasing with resident notice. Low-VOC, sectioned so the unit stays liveable. |
| Common areas | Scheduled or as-needed | Corridors, stairwells, breezeways, laundry rooms, clubhouses. Usually phased or after-hours. |
| Community repaints | Every 5–10 years | Full building or full community, often tied to a rebrand or a reserve-funded cycle. |
Most of our volume is the first one. But a property that only ever paints vacant units ends up with pristine interiors and a corridor nobody’s touched since 2019 — and prospects walk that corridor before they see the unit.
Why Speed Matters
Painting is 60–70% of what a turn costs — and all of the critical path
At Jacksonville’s average rent of roughly $1,300–$1,550 a month, a vacant unit burns $43–$52 every day it isn’t leased.
Painting is where most of that time goes. Flooring can be scheduled around. Appliances swap in an afternoon. But nothing else finishes until the walls do, and nobody tours a half-painted unit.
The national average turnover cost is $3,872 per unit, with lost rent accounting for 35–50% of it. And that number is moving in the wrong direction — the NAA’s Income/Expense IQ benchmarks recorded turnover costs rising 17.5% year over year, with vacancy and rent loss reaching $1,323 per unit, a fourth consecutive annual increase.
Zego 2026 Resident Experience Management Report; NAA Income/Expense IQ.
Cut four days off a turn and you recover $175–$210 per unit. Across 100 turns a year, that’s $17,500–$21,000 back into NOI — without changing anything about the paint.
Why Turns Run Late
Most turns run long because the work happens in the wrong order
An industry benchmark for a full make-ready is 3–5 days. Most run roughly twice that — and the usual reason isn’t slow trades. It’s sequencing.
Cleaning scheduled before paint, so the unit gets cleaned twice. Paint before drywall repair, so patches get cut into finished walls. Flooring before plumbing, so a leak means pulling new floor. Every one of those is a day, and they compound.
The order that works:
- Trash-out and clear — nothing gets done around someone’s abandoned furniture
- Repairs — drywall, plumbing, electrical, appliances. All of it before any finish work.
- Paint — after repairs, before cleaning. Non-negotiable.
- Flooring — if it’s being replaced
- Final clean — last, so nothing undoes it
- Punch and walk — plates on, fixtures in, keys re-cut
Paint after repairs, clean after paint. Reverse either and you’re paying for the same work twice.
We run this sequence whether we’re doing the whole turn or just the paint — which means we’ll tell you if the schedule you’ve been given puts us in the wrong slot.
See the full day-by-day breakdown on the Unit Turn Painting page →
What’s In The Price
What a standard apartment paint covers
Included as standard
- Walls, ceilings, trim, doors, closets
- Drywall patching and texture matching
- Caulking at trim and wet areas
- Switch plates and outlet covers removed, then reinstalled
- Appliance, fixture and floor masking
- Mildewcide-containing acrylic in kitchens, baths and laundry
- Photos before and after, per unit
- Punch-ready handoff — no cleanup left behind
Quoted as add-ons
- Full color change (extra coats plus primer)
- Pet odor sealing (sealing primer required)
- Smoke or nicotine remediation
- Water damage requiring stain-blocking primer
- Cabinet refinishing
- Popcorn ceiling removal
- Trash-out coordination
Add-ons are line-itemed at the walk. Nothing appears on the invoice that wasn’t on the quote.
Proof, Not Promises
Recent apartment turns, before and after
Photos go here as jobs complete — every unit we turn gets documented, before and after.
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BEFORE — Living room
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AFTER — Living room
Living Room
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BEFORE — Kitchen & bath
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AFTER — Kitchen & bath
Kitchen & Bath
Jacksonville Specifics
What Northeast Florida does to interior paint
Humidity extends dry time
We sit at 70–90% relative humidity most of the year with around 52 inches of rain. A coat that flashes off in two hours somewhere dry takes considerably longer here in August. Recoating too early traps moisture in the film and causes adhesion failure months later. It gets built into the schedule rather than ignored.
Mildew comes back through cheap paint
Bathrooms, kitchens, laundry closets and north-facing bedroom walls are where it starts. Painting over untreated mildew doesn’t kill it — the film feeds it and it returns within a season or two. Those surfaces get cleaned and treated first, then coated with a mildewcide-containing acrylic. If you’re repainting the same bathroom wall every turn, this is why.
Sheen matters more here than elsewhere
Flat on ceilings, flat or eggshell on living areas, semi-gloss on doors, trim, kitchens and baths. Semi-gloss on a living room wall highlights every drywall seam — but flat in a Florida bathroom fails inside two turns.
Hurricane season creates repaint work
June through November, wind-driven rain finds its way in around windows and through roof and soffit failures. Those walls need a stain-blocking primer before any finish coat, or the water line ghosts back through within weeks.
Occupied Units
Painting with residents in place
Mid-tenancy painting is a different job from a vacant turn, and pricing it the same way is how vendors lose money on it.
How we run it:
- Notice through your leasing office — we don’t door-knock residents, and we work to whatever notice period your lease requires
- Sectioned, not whole-unit — one or two rooms at a time so the resident keeps a functional apartment
- Low-VOC coatings — so the space is re-occupiable the same day rather than requiring a hotel night
- Furniture moved and covered, not painted around
- Same-day cleanup — a resident coming home to drop cloths and tape is a complaint
Most common triggers: lease renewal incentives, mid-tenancy damage repair, accessibility or ADA work, and units where a resident has agreed to a color change at their own cost.
Who We Serve
Who we paint for
Property Managers
Graded on days vacant and turn cost.
Maintenance Supervisors
Hand us the heavy turns, keep your techs on work orders.
Regional & Portfolio Managers
One spec and one price across every community.
Multifamily Owners
The per-unit math and the repaint cycle.
HOA & Condo Associations
Guideline compliance and board-ready proposals.
Senior & Assisted Living
Year-round turnover, wet-sanding, sealed vents, zero-VOC.
Where We Work
Apartment painting across Northeast Florida
Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties. Densest coverage is the Southside–Baymeadows–Gate Parkway corridor, where most of Jacksonville’s apartment inventory sits.
Southside & Baymeadows · Arlington · Mandarin · San Marco & Riverside · Northside · Westside · The Beaches · Orange Park & Fleming Island · Ponte Vedra · Nocatee · St. Augustine · Fernandina
Questions
Apartment painting questions
How much does apartment painting cost per unit in Jacksonville?
Turn painting in the Southeast typically runs around $800 for a 1BR/1BA and $1,000 for a 2BR/1BA when the painter supplies materials. Per square foot, multifamily work generally falls between $1.50 and $3.00. Unit size, drywall repair, whether ceilings are included and whether you’re changing color are what actually move the number. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.
How long does it take to paint an apartment?
Most vacant units take 2–3 days. The industry benchmark for a full make-ready — all trades, not just paint — is 3–5 days, though most run longer when the work is sequenced badly.
Do you paint occupied units?
Yes. Scheduled through your leasing office with resident notice, sectioned so the unit stays liveable, and using low-VOC coatings so residents aren’t displaced overnight.
What kind of paint do you use in apartments?
Depends on surface and property spec. Kitchens, baths and laundry get a mildewcide-containing acrylic in semi-gloss — in Jacksonville humidity anything less washable fails early. Ceilings get flat. Walls get flat or eggshell depending on whether you repaint every turn or need washability.
Can you match our existing color?
Yes, and if there’s no record of what was used we can cut a small sample of drywall paper from inside a closet and have it scanned to match the wall as it looks now rather than as it was originally specified. See our Paint Matching guide for how this works.
Do you handle drywall repair too?
Yes — anchor holes, doorknob blowouts, water damage, and texture matching on orange peel and knockdown. Repairs go before paint, always.
Can you paint common areas and corridors?
Yes. Usually phased or scheduled after hours so resident traffic keeps moving.
Do you work on contract?
Yes, and most of our work is. Fixed price per unit type across your portfolio, reserved capacity through turn season, one monthly invoice on net terms.
How fast can you start?
Same business day on scheduling requests, and we can usually walk a property within 48 hours. Turn season — roughly May through August — fills early, so contract clients get reserved slots.
What areas do you cover?
Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties across Northeast Florida.
Get a per-unit price for your property
Tell us the property, the unit mix, and roughly how many turns you run a month. We’ll walk it at no charge and come back with a fixed price per 1BR, 2BR and 3BR.
No charge for the walk. Turn-season scheduling fills early — if you’re planning May through August, talk to us in Q1.