A furnished lease case that started with a conversation at the county permit desk

@priya_n21 that's the question I had too. Also @nicole_adeyemi, was the five-month lease firm, or did it have an early out if the substation job finished ahead of schedule? Every corporate lease I've read about seems to have a termination clause with 30 days notice and I don't know whether that's standard or just what people accept.

@diane_kowalski early termination language is common in corporate leases because the company's need is tied to a project schedule they don't fully control. It isn't imposed on you. It's negotiated, and the trade is usually rate. A firm five-month term at a lower monthly number and a cancelable term at a higher one are both reasonable structures. If you accept a 30-day out, you're carrying the schedule risk, so price it.

On @nicole_adeyemi's numbers, the thing doing the work isn't the $3,100. It's that the unit was going vacant anyway and the furniture spend was $8,600 rather than $18,000. The furnished premium here is about $1,650 a month gross, roughly $1,230 after the included costs. That pays back the package in about seven months of occupied time. If the unit is occupied furnished eight months a year, the package earns its keep. At four months a year it doesn't, and you'd have been better off plain.

So the assumption to test is annual furnished occupancy, not the monthly rate. Rate is easy to verify by calling extended-stay hotels and a corporate housing provider in your market. Occupancy you can only estimate from how many placing entities you actually know.

One mechanical point. Stays of 30 days or more often fall outside city short-term rental ordinances, but that threshold and its definition vary by city and state, and some jurisdictions apply lodging or occupancy tax below a longer cutoff. Read your own ordinance and confirm the tax treatment with a professional in your state before you price around it. How furniture is depreciated is also a question for your CPA.

What stands out is that none of it required becoming a hospitality operator. One lease, one company paying by invoice, biweekly cleaning. That is the boring end of the range, and the boring end is where this kind of arrangement holds up.