Student Move-Out and Rental Turnover in Greeley

Greeley runs on two calendars. One is the construction season, which opens when the frost lifts around 12 May and closes in October. The other is the lease calendar, and it belongs to a side of this city that most waste guidance ignores completely.

Greeley is 39.1 percent renter-occupied. Weld County as a whole is 22.1 percent. That is not a small difference; it is a different housing market inside the county it governs. The city has about 39,551 households and roughly 115,073 people, and the University of Northern Colorado, at 501 20th Street, enrolled 8,807 students in fall 2025 by the university’s own count. Add a second campus at Aims Community College out on West 20th Street and a large stock of older, divided, multi-tenant housing, and you get a city where a meaningful share of the housing changes hands twice a year on a fixed schedule.

Leases turn in early May and again in mid-August. Everything below is about those two fortnights and how to get through them without a pile at the curb.

Why the May turn is the hard one

Because three calendars land on top of each other.

The academic year ends in early May, and a year of accumulated furniture, mattresses, kitchen equipment and boxes leaves a lot of houses at once. The average last spring frost is 12 May, so every deferred outdoor project in the city starts moving in the same fortnight. And the City’s own Annual Spring Clean-Up runs for two days in early May, which sounds like the answer and mostly is not.

Here is why it mostly is not, in the City’s own published terms. The clean-up is open to City of Greeley residents only, with a valid photo ID confirming Greeley residency. It charges $25 per carload or pickup and $35 per trailer. It takes appliances, furniture, mattresses, scrap metal and tires — genuinely useful for a turnover — but with one Freon-containing appliance per household and a maximum of four tires. And then:

• “No household trash or bagged items. All materials must be fully visible.”
• “Vehicles with bagged loads will be turned away.”
• “No enclosed trailers or box trucks.”
• Prohibited: “Construction or demolition debris (including dirt, concrete, masonry, plywood, and similar materials).”

A tenant clearing their own apartment can absolutely use the clean-up for a couch and a mattress. A landlord or property manager clearing three houses in the same week cannot. Not on residency and ID grounds, not on the bagged-load rule, not in two days, and not for anything that came off a wall. The full picture is in what the City clean-up will not take; the Clean-Up line is 970-350-9336.

The August turn is shorter and tighter

August has a different shape. There is no municipal event, no frost date, and usually a much smaller window: a unit vacates, and it has to be cleared, cleaned, repaired and re-let in days rather than weeks. The debris is the same but the tolerance for a slow route is far lower.

Practically, that means booking the container before the tenancy ends rather than after, and it means having the box on site while the clearing is happening instead of stacking material in the yard for a later collection. A stack in the yard is where a turnover goes wrong, for reasons the City’s own code makes plain further down this page.

What actually comes out of a rental turn

Turnover debris is almost the opposite of demolition debris. It is light and bulky: volume runs out long before weight does.

• Mattresses and box springs — the single greatest consumer of container volume there is
• Particle-board and flat-pack furniture, futons, bed frames, desks, shelving
• Sofas and armchairs, often more than one per house
• Rugs, curtains, bedding, clothing, kitchenware, food from the cupboards
• Bagged general household goods, in quantity
• Broken blinds, damaged doors, carpet lifted for replacement

And a short list of things that cannot go in the container, all of which show up in student and rental clearances more often than anywhere else:

• Televisions, monitors, computers, printers. Electronic devices have been banned from Colorado landfills since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Weld County runs e-waste collections; the City refers residents to them.
• Mini-fridges, window air conditioners, dehumidifiers. Anything holding refrigerant needs the refrigerant recovered by a qualified technician first. A student house can produce several mini-fridges in a week.
• Paint, cleaning chemicals, solvents, motor oil, fuel cans, pool chemicals, batteries. These come out of garages and basements at turnover in surprising volume, and they belong at Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility, 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley — (970) 400-2217, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., free to every Weld County resident, limit 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, no leaking containers, no plastic bags. That facility does not take electronics or appliances.
• Tires. Refused locally and handled through registered channels.

Sorting those four categories out before the box arrives is the difference between a clean pickup and a rejected load. Our Colorado disposal guide is the full list.

Sizing a turnover

Because the load is light and bulky, size by volume and by how many units you are clearing rather than by weight.

• One apartment or a small unit — a 15-yard. Turnover debris is light and bulky, so it runs out of room long before it runs out of weight, and the 10 is the wrong shape for it.
• A house that has been let to four or five tenants — a 20-yard. This is the common answer around the older streets near campus.
• Several units in the same week, or a whole small building — a 30-yard left on site beats three separate deliveries, and it gives you somewhere to put everything as each unit empties.
• Add a separate small box if you are also doing hard work between tenancies — tile, a bathroom, a slab. Heavy debris does not share a container well.

Mattresses deserve their own warning: they do not compact, they do not stack neatly, and four of them will take a surprising share of a 15-yard box. Count them honestly before you order. The Greeley sizing guide has the rest, and the sizes page puts the boxes side by side.

Where the box goes in the older streets

The rental belt in Greeley is mostly the older half of the city — the streets around UNC, and the blocks between campus and downtown. That means short driveways, detached garages down a narrow apron, alleys behind, mature trees hanging over the curb line, and cars parked both sides of the street in term time.

Three placement points matter.

On the driveway or the lot, no City right-of-way permit is in play. That is the easy case and it is what we aim for.

In the street, it is a permit matter and the City is explicit about it. The City’s own permitting guidance states that “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” That is Greeley Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881, 2835 W. 10th Street, Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sort it before the tenancy ends, not on the day. Details in the permit guide.

Five feet from anything combustible, always. Greeley adopted the 2021 International Fire Code at Greeley Municipal Code § 22-454, effective 1 January 2023, and makes no amendment to Section 304. Under Section 304.3, a dumpster must not be stored inside a building or placed within five feet of a combustible wall, and every roll-off is far over the size threshold in that section. On a multi-unit property with wood siding and a covered stair, that rule is not academic. The Greeley Fire Prevention Bureau answers placement questions on (970) 350-9510.

One surface note: a loaded container is heavy and Greeley springs are wet at the wrong moments. We put plywood under the wheels and the rails as a matter of course, and on soft ground after rain that is not optional. The Colorado Geological Survey maps a potentially swelling soil corridor running from Fort Collins and Greeley in the north down to Pueblo and Cañon City — Greeley is the northern anchor of it. We will not tell you what the ground does at your particular address, because that takes a geotechnical investigation. We will tell you that keeping water away from a foundation and putting a plated pad under a heavy box are both good ideas here. See the driveway protection guide.

The code a Greeley landlord should actually know

Four provisions of the Greeley Municipal Code come up constantly at turnover, and they are all short.

• § 12-269(b) — “All refuse and debris remaining as a result of the demolition or repair of any buildings or the erection and completion of any buildings shall be removed following substantial completion of the work.” If you renovate between tenancies, clearing up is a municipal obligation, not a preference.
• § 12-269(a) — household trash containers may sit on the public right-of-way “for one 24-hour period within a seven-day period.” That is the weekly cart rule. It is not permission to stage a move-out at the curb for a week, and it is not permission to leave a roll-off in the street.
• § 12-272 — nobody other than the owner, occupant, lessee or tenant who placed a container may disturb it or its contents. In a dense rental block where four houses are emptying at once, that is the provision behind “please do not fill our box.”
• § 20-974 — the City’s definition of refuse expressly includes “upholstered furniture… used or stored outdoors in any unroofed area.” The couch on the porch is, in Greeley, legally refuse. Code enforcement questions go through Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311.

And one thing we will not advise on: tenants’ abandoned belongings. What a landlord may lawfully do with property left behind is a legal question with a legal process attached, and it is not ours to answer. Talk to your attorney before anything a former tenant might still own goes in a container. We will happily place the box; the decision about what goes in it is yours to take properly.

Renovating between tenancies in an old house

This is where Greeley’s rental stock and Greeley’s housing age meet, and it deserves attention.

The median Greeley home was built in 1985. About 46 percent of the housing predates 1980, roughly 29 percent was built between 1960 and 1979, and 7.2 percent dates from 1939 or earlier. Rental housing skews to the older stock. So a turnover renovation here routinely involves a building old enough for two federal and state programs to apply.

Lead. Federal renovation, repair and painting rules apply to compensated work disturbing painted surfaces in housing built before 1978 — and rental housing is squarely the housing that program was written around. Colorado is not an EPA-authorized state for this program, so firms certify with the EPA directly rather than through a state agency. epa.gov publishes the requirements. If you hire out the repaint of a pre-1978 rental, ask the contractor about certification before they start.

Asbestos. In Colorado this is an air quality matter, under CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B, on 720-507-5136. The single-family trigger levels are low: 32 square feet, 50 linear feet, or the volume of a 55-gallon drum. Above those, removal requires ten working days’ notification, and notification is required for any demolition regardless of quantity. Buildings built after 12 October 1988 are exempt from the inspection requirement. Textured ceilings, old vinyl floor tile and the mastic under it, and pipe insulation are the usual suspects in a 1960s or 1970s rental. Thirty-two square feet is one small bathroom floor.

Neither program is a reason to panic. Both are a reason to get the inspection done before the demolition rather than after, so that what ends up in our container is ordinary debris. There is more in the older Greeley homes guide.

A turnover sequence that works

1. Book the container before the tenancy ends, especially in the first half of May and in mid-August. Give us the address, the driveway and whether anything has to sit in the street.
2. Pull the four excluded categories out first — electronics, refrigerant appliances, hazardous chemicals, tires — and run them to 17th Avenue or an e-waste collection.
3. Deal with anything a former tenant may still own under whatever process your attorney advises, before the box arrives.
4. Load the bulky items first — sofas, mattresses, bed frames — and break down flat-pack furniture. It doubles what fits.
5. Keep hard demolition separate if there is any: tile, mortar, concrete and old flooring belong in a dedicated small box.
6. Keep the load level and covered. One of the landfills serving this region publishes that all uncovered or unsecured loads will be charged double, and the wind here is real.
7. Book the pull the day before you need it gone, not the morning of the new tenancy.

For property managers running several turns a season

The pattern we see most often is a standing arrangement rather than a scramble: containers scheduled against the lease calendar, a 30 on site through the worst week, and swaps rather than a single oversized box. Residential containers, junk removal where you would rather not do the lifting, estate cleanout where a unit has been occupied for decades, and same-day service for the ones that go wrong. Tell us your turn dates in March and August and we will hold the calendar.

Call (970) 888-6911. If your properties are outside the Greeley city limits — in Evans, Garden City, or out in unincorporated Weld — say so, because the permit answers are different and we do not assume Greeley’s rules travel. The service areas page shows where we run, and the FAQ page covers the rest.