A furnished placement can fall apart over paperwork after the furniture is already bought

Take a fourplex, older building, all four units on plain long term leases. Unit 2 comes open in summer, and a corporate housing provider has called twice over the previous year asking about furnished inventory. An owner in that position says yes and starts furnishing before anything is signed. That's the mistake, and everything below is the cost of it. Say $7,600 goes out over five weeks. Beds, sofa, dining, kitchen, linens, a desk in each bedroom because traveling professionals want somewhere to work. Photograph it properly and send it over. What comes back is a vendor onboarding packet. Certificate of insurance with specific limits and their entity as additional insured. W-9. A signed services agreement. Net 45 payment terms. A requirement for a 24 hour contact number that a person answers. A housekeeping schedule with a linen standard, meaning a second set of linens per bed in inventory at all times. A standard landlord policy rarely meets those limits, and moving to what corporate housing asks for usually changes how the policy is written and costs more. Net 45 against utilities, internet, and cleaning going out on the first means floating the unit for six weeks per invoice cycle, which most owners haven't budgeted for. Asking for net 15 typically gets a flat no, the card is the card. A week to think it over and the provider often places the person elsewhere, which isn't unreasonable when they have someone arriving. A common outcome is backfilling nine weeks later with an individual on an eight month furnished lease at a rate below the projected corporate rate but above plain rent, say $1,725 against plain rent of $1,450 and a projected corporate rate of $2,600. The cost stacks up fast: nine weeks vacant at roughly $1,450 of plain rent forgone, about $3,000, plus utility carrying cost during the gap, plus $7,600 of furniture sitting there earning maybe $275 a month over plain rent. The fix is simple: ask for the onboarding packet on the first phone call, a year before furnishing anything. It's a document. They'll send it. Everything that surprises an owner later is usually printed in it.