Medium-term furnished rental versus a twelve-month lease on a planned 680 square foot ADU, and why that decision comes before the build

The assumption doing the most work in your model is that ten-month average occupancy holds at the unit level, not just the market level. What the furnished rental managers are reporting is a portfolio average across their inventory. Individual units, especially newer ones entering a market that already has established listings with reviews, tend to underperform that average for the first six to twelve months while the listing builds placement in search and repeat referral networks. Your eight-month breakeven is tight enough that a soft first year erases most of the Year 1 spread and pushes your furniture payback out meaningfully.

The risk you did not mention is the traveling nurse pipeline specifically. OHSU contract volume is real and the corridor has been consistent, but that demand is institutional and can shift with hospital budget cycles, contract staffing policy changes, or a competing furnished inventory build in the same pocket. Four years of manager-reported data is reasonable signal, but it is one demand source, and if you are optimizing the spec for that tenant profile, you are also concentrating the risk there.

On the spec decisions, your instinct about the washer/dryer and kitchen finish is correct. Furnished medium-term tenants in the traveling professional segment treat those as baseline, and a shared laundry situation will suppress your achievable rate and occupancy versus comparable private units. The parking question depends on whether your target tenant is arriving by car, which traveling nurses frequently are given shift schedules and commute patterns from outer Southeast to OHSU.

The fourteen-month runway actually helps you, because the Fannie Mae ADU income qualification policy effective March 2026 is worth confirming in writing with your lender since how it interacts with furnished rental income versus standard lease income may affect your qualification math. A licensed mortgage professional needs to confirm the current terms for your specific deal.

What is your current assumption on lease-up timeline for the first booking after CO, and are you modeling any gap between certificate of occupancy and first occupancy?

Dropped below eight months once in Tacoma on a similar play, lost $2,200 net that year versus what a boring long lease would have paid.

What does the traveling nurse pipeline actually look like if OHSU cuts contract staff during a budget squeeze?

The spec decision is the one not to rush, because getting it wrong costs more than the income difference ever recovers. Take a 720 square foot unit in outer Northeast Portland built to long-term spec, where the owner tries to pivot to furnished MTR after the first tenant leaves in month fourteen. Getting the counter and appliance level to where traveling professionals actually expect it means gutting the kitchen to studs, the bathroom vanity gets redone, and a dedicated parking pad gets added because the street situation on that block is a dealbreaker for OHSU staff doing twelve-hour shifts. That renovation mid-stream runs around $22,000 on top of the original build. Specced right the first time, it would have been maybe $9,000 more at construction. The delta between doing it once correctly and doing it twice is enormous, and it is the thing your model is probably not pricing. The washer dryer question is a deal qualifier for MTR rather than a preference question. A shared laundry setup in a detached structure will cost you back-to-back traveling nurse bookings, because the hospital contract coordinators who place those nurses treat in-unit laundry as a hard requirement on their checklist for anything over thirty days. That is a firm line rather than a soft preference. Shared laundry will keep you in the vacation rental market and out of the healthcare worker relocation market, which is the more reliable demand pool in that OHSU corridor. If you are genuinely targeting that segment, the parking and the laundry stop being line items to optimize on and become the product itself.

The thing worth pressing on in your numbers is that the $2,100 to $2,400 range is doing a lot of lifting, and it is a 14% spread inside what you are treating as a single scenario. If the furnished managers quoting that corridor are averaging across unit sizes and finish levels, a 680 square foot cottage that is not walking distance to anything is probably landing closer to the $2,100 floor than the $2,400 ceiling, which pushes payback on the furniture out toward four and a half years instead of under three, and thins your buffer above the eight-month break-even at the same time. Operators who spec a similar sized unit in a nurse-heavy corridor often find the projected rate and the rate actually cleared in month one sitting about $180 apart, which does not sound like much until there is a vacancy in February. The question your numbers do not answer is whether anyone has talked to the traveling nurse staffing agencies placing at OHSU directly, rather than only the furnished rental managers who have every reason to paint demand as stable. The agency side will tell you contract lengths and how far out they are booking housing right now, which is a different signal than historical average occupancy. If OHSU contracts are running thirteen weeks and agencies are booking six to eight weeks out, you have a real pipeline. If they are running eight weeks and agencies are scrambling two weeks out, your ten-month average occupancy assumption is fragile in a way that will not show up in the landlord-reported data you are working from.

OHSU contract volume is the number to verify with the hospital's housing office directly, rather than with managers who have inventory to fill.