From the desk:Corporate / Furnished Housing

Every furnished comp I find is downtown. Does this work in a suburb?

Six months of driving neighborhoods and I've got maybe thirty properties on a spreadsheet. None of them are downtown because I can't make downtown pencil at all.

Every corporate furnished listing I can find in my metro is in three downtown buildings. Rates look like $2,600 to $3,100 for a 1 bed. Out where I'm actually shopping, twenty minutes north, near a big insurance campus and a medical office cluster, I can't find a single furnished listing to compare against. Not one.

So either nobody wants furnished out there, or nobody has tried, and I can't tell which from a spreadsheet. The purchase prices are half of downtown and the unfurnished rents are maybe 65 percent, which is the gap I keep staring at.

A 2 bed condo out there runs $210,000 and rents unfurnished at $1,600. If furnished corporate is even $2,300, that's a very different deal than the same math downtown at $400,000 and $2,900.

The thing I don't know how to check: how do I find out whether business travelers to that insurance campus are staying anywhere near it, or whether they all stay downtown and drive out? That answer decides whether half my spreadsheet is worth anything.

Answer

-1jessreyes12AU1APRO8

I'd have been embarrassed to ask this out loud a year ago so I'll ask it here. Have you called the hotels near the insurance campus and asked what their weeknight occupancy looks like and whether they get long stay requests? Front desk staff will tell you a surprising amount, especially midweek in the afternoon. If the two limited service hotels by that campus are running full Monday through Thursday and turning away anyone wanting three weeks, you have your answer without a single furnished comp.

2 replies

1ryanmck27SC2C

Also, no listings doesn't mean no market. Corporate furnished often never appears on a public listing site at all, it moves through relocation firms and repeat direct clients. The downtown buildings you're finding are the ones with a marketing budget.

@compass's hotel call is the right first move. Second one is to look at whether that insurance campus has an internal relocation or travel department and find out who they use. Big employers usually have a preferred vendor list and there is a human whose job it is to maintain it.