How Three Student Housing Operators Retired the Turn Spreadsheet

Ask a student housing operator what runs their turn season, and for most of the industry the honest answer is a spreadsheet — a beloved, battle-tested, homegrown workbook that one person built years ago and everyone now depends on. The three operators in this story had exactly that. Between them they manage tens of thousands of beds, and until recently, the most important weeks of their year ran on Excel and Google Sheets.

This year, all three retired those workbooks and standardized turn across their full student portfolios on EZOS. We interviewed the leaders who drove each rollout: Lane Sheer, Vice President of Property Operations at Preiss, Erin Carter, Strategic Operations Manager at Coastal Ridge Real Estate, and Dale Callison, Sr. Director of Maintenance Operations at Core Spaces. What follows is their account — why they moved, what their committees needed to see, how they trained hundreds of site staff, and what they'd tell an operator standing where they stood a year ago.

Every operator has a workbook. Every workbook has a limit.

None of the three described their old system with contempt. Preiss ran a Google Sheet they called the Turn Workbook — 'a very robust sheet that housed everything a site needed to keep track of during turn,' as Sheer describes it, with vendor schedulers, rent-roll imports, damage logs, and invoice tracking. Coastal Ridge had 'an intricate excel turn board' Carter's team was proud of. Core Spaces tracked work per bed in an internal worksheet with cost estimating built in.

The limits showed up at scale. Coastal Ridge's board was 'becoming cumbersome to manage across so many properties without the file constantly breaking' — with the ever-present risk of a missed unit hiding in a broken formula. Core Spaces kept a log of the corrections their team made to site turn boards one summer: 62 of them between May and August, with one community needing six. 'While that seems like a pretty low number,' Callison says, 'it made us worry about all the corrections folks may need but be unaware of.' Their internal cost forecasts, he adds, 'were off by an embarrassing magnitude.' And a workforce shift was making it worse: newer community managers simply aren't the Excel power users their predecessors were. Core Spaces had pushed linked workbooks as far as linked workbooks go.

“I think we about found the limit on what Microsoft could handle when it came to external links.”

— Dale Callison, Sr. Director of Maintenance Operations, Core Spaces

The pilot: start small, let the results talk

All three companies entered the same way — a champion, a handful of properties, and a turn season as the test. Preiss started with three properties under one regional manager (one site manager had used EZTurn at a prior company); the next year it was twelve sites, and this year the full portfolio. Coastal Ridge piloted four properties in Turn 2025; Carter then pitched the student portfolio, and Turn 2026 ran across 44 sites. Core Spaces began with five communities, which grew to seven — partly because acquisitions they made were already running on EZOS.

At Coastal Ridge, Carter's pitch upward was simple — 'we had a successful pilot,' Carter says, 'and the feedback and data was easy to sell.' Sheer watched the same dynamic carry the Preiss rollout:

“Our early adopter sites were a big part of our portfolio rollout — getting the sites that were new to EZTurn excited about what it can do.”

— Lane Sheer, Vice President of Property Operations, Preiss

The decision: what every department needed to see

Going portfolio-wide is a committee decision, and the three interviews map that committee precisely. At Core Spaces, the room included Operations, Maintenance, the Executive Team, Centralized Accounting, and the technology team — each with its own bar to clear. Operations wanted portfolio clarity and easy roll-ups across teams and regionals. Maintenance wanted something genuinely easy for technicians, 'usually the most reluctant to new tech initiatives.' The executive team wanted real payback and transparency on where to send resources. The tech team ran it against internal security protocols. At Coastal Ridge, Operations specifically wanted an offset in turn payroll or expense management, the ability to manage multiple turns remotely, and real-time data throughout.

The biggest hesitation? For Core Spaces, price — 'moving from a practically free solution to something that has some cost to it is always tough,' Callison says. Callison pushed hard for the change anyway, and the counter-argument carried the day:

“While we could keep running our internal worksheets, it was not sustainable, trainable, and didn't scale as easily as a purpose-built software.”

— Dale Callison, Sr. Director of Maintenance Operations, Core Spaces

Not every function converted at once, either — Core's centralized accounting team kept its familiar charge workflow, so Core runs the turn board today while inspections and charges wait their turn. Adoption, in practice, is modular: each team signs on when the system beats their current way of working.

The rollout is a training program

Ask all three what made the portfolio rollout succeed and none of them lead with software. They lead with training. Preiss built internal tutorials and SOPs, ran role-specific sessions for regional managers, and added weekly office hours where any site could bring questions. Core Spaces split training into two phases — team, vendor, and schedule setup first; mobile app, change orders, and invoicing two months later — and used the EZOS video library to build an internal training track for new hires.

“We felt that we had to be very available to ensure our sites felt supported — which we believe led to such a successful turn.”

— Lane Sheer, Vice President of Property Operations, Preiss

Coastal Ridge went furthest: a bi-weekly cadence alternating with standard turn-prep calls, each session teaching one small step, followed by office hours the next day and 'homework' due before the next call — six sessions, with an audit holding managers accountable. 'People are emotionally attached to turn and their practices to run it,' Carter says. 'It was a big change that we really forced compliance on.'

The two companies also ran a natural experiment on one question every operator asks: mandatory or optional? Preiss made year one optional — and could see exactly which sites used the system and which quietly kept their old tools. Next year it's required. Coastal Ridge mandated from day one. Carter's verdict:

“I think full portfolio adoption is the way to go, no phases. Just rip the band aid! ... I actually can't imagine running turn the old way now. I also can't imagine running two turn management systems.”

— Erin Carter, Strategic Operations Manager, Coastal Ridge Real Estate

What changed: turn, visible from anywhere

Pressed on what portfolio standardization actually delivers, all three converge on the same answer: for the first time, the people responsible for dozens of turns can see all of them, live. Callison spent turn season in the EZFolio project dashboard — 'it was where I lived during turn and how I gave all of my reports' — with regional managers trained on the same view. Sheer's team caught sites that hadn't assigned vendors by deadline, watched who was ahead or behind schedule, and tracked damage trends portfolio-wide; the system's automatic Concern Level emails 'give you a full picture of how turn is going at a site.' Carter's team spotted pricing issues early enough to get more bids before a site went over budget — something the old Excel board could only estimate after manual manipulation.

“The real time in the app, no lag time waiting on reports or boards to update — you can see the status of things at any moment. We have never had that ability until now.”

— Erin Carter, Strategic Operations Manager, Coastal Ridge Real Estate

The consolidation is real, too. At Preiss, EZTurn replaced three separate systems: a paid inspection app whose reports had to be emailed unit by unit into a shared drive, the Turn Workbook itself, and the move-in inspection process — which now uses EZOS's AI to compare damage charges against each resident's move-in condition report, 'to ensure we don't charge for something they listed as existing damage when they moved in.'

What they'd tell you

We asked each leader what they'd say to an operator running EZOS at five properties and weighing the portfolio move.

“Get those 5 sites on board with the product and knowledgeable about all aspects. Their knowledge and first-hand experience will help get the portfolio on board when it is rolled out.”

— Lane Sheer, Vice President of Property Operations, Preiss

“Do it! ... My best advice is to do training in chunks, review, and quiz people. Have an open door policy and be very available. As long as you prepare ahead and focus on training it will be great.”

— Erin Carter, Strategic Operations Manager, Coastal Ridge Real Estate

“If they have a good focus on training, clear and consistent expectations for teams, and a good idea of their core trackables and how to derive them, they could be successful with a portfolio rollout for sure.”

— Dale Callison, Sr. Director of Maintenance Operations, Core Spaces

The honest ledger

A case study you can trust should include the unfinished parts, so here they are. Final turn economics land after the operators close their books this fall — Core Spaces runs a dollars-per-bed-turned analysis after September month-end, and Coastal Ridge will share final numbers when they're in; we'll update this piece when they do. Core's accounting team hasn't adopted the charge workflow yet, and Callison notes the dashboard's sorting counts were occasionally imperfect — 'close enough to give us a good idea,' but something we're improving. That's the deal we make with every operator in this story and every one who reads it: the system gets better every year, and the people in this piece are a large part of why.