Pricing a unit furnished for corporate tenants when it goes vacant in March

Before the furniture question, who actually signs? I've been reading screening material for months and the thing that jumps out is that a corporate stay can mean the company is the tenant of record, or the employee signs and the company reimburses them. Those are different applications and different collection problems if someone stops paying. Do you know which one the hospital contractors near you would be?

Don't order furniture in February. Order furniture when someone has asked you for a furnished unit and you had to say no. Ten months of occupancy from a standing start with zero contacts is a guess dressed up as a number.

What is actually in "housewares" for $11,400? I assumed furnished meant a couch and a bed, but the corporate listings I looked at seem to include silverware and a can opener and a shower curtain. Is the expectation that a person arrives with a suitcase and nothing else?

@kevin_lombard yes, that is the standard. Someone lands with a suitcase and cooks dinner that night. @brandonlee36 your math treats vacant months as zero, which is correct for rent and incorrect for cost. Utilities keep running when the unit is empty, and you cannot shut internet off for six weeks and turn it back on for a Monday arrival. So your $240 is twelve months, $2,880, which you did include. What you left out is the two weeks between the furniture arriving and the first booking, and furniture wearing out. If the package lasts five years that is $2,280 a year of replacement, which eats more than the entire $1,900 spread. The real question is whether corporate rent is $2,300 or $2,600.

@karen_whitfield that is circular though. Nobody books a unit that does not exist. Relocation coordinators want photos of the actual furnished unit and a date it is available, and a plan is not something they can sell to a transferee. There is a middle version. Buy the furniture used or on a rental agreement for the first six months and take the photos. See whether the phone rings before committing to the real package. Furniture rental is expensive per month and cheap as a test.

Call three relocation management companies before February 10 and ask for their vendor requirements. Not to get booked, to find out what disqualifies you. Most of them have a list, insurance limits, response times, whether you accept their standard rate card, background requirements for anyone entering the unit. I've seen owners furnish a whole unit and then discover their coverage doesn't meet the minimum on the vendor packet. That call costs you nothing and it's the only piece of the occupancy question you can actually get an answer to this month.

What happens to the furniture on the books? Whether an $11,400 package gets expensed in one year or written down over several depends on how it is itemized and elected, and that changes your payback math a lot. That is a CPA question worth asking before ordering rather than after. Also, three weeks of vacancy unfurnished is a good record. Know what breaks that record before trading it for an unknown.

$11,400 for a 2 bed sounds high to me. I priced a similar package out of warehouse store inventory and a couple of clearance runs and got to about $6,800 with delivery, and that included a decent mattress in both rooms, which is the one place I wouldn't cheap out. The supplier premium buys you one delivery date and one invoice. If your February 10 deadline is really a supplier's deadline rather than a market deadline, that's worth naming.

The version of this that works without corporate contacts is renting furnished by the month to whoever needs a month. Travel healthcare is the obvious one, then insurance placements after a house fire and people between closings. Same furniture and the same premium over unfurnished, with no relocation vendor packet to assemble. You give up some rate. You also give up the part where your income depends on relationships you have not built yet.

Take an operator running one furnished unit out of eleven doors. Year one occupancy comes in around 6.5 months against a pro forma of ten. Year two lands at 9. The difference is typically one property manager at a staffing outfit who starts calling directly, and that contact usually gets made by showing up with a folder after four cold emails go nowhere. Plausible numbers on a slightly smaller unit: $2,150 a month, $265 in utilities and internet, cleans at $190, and a sofa and one mattress replaced around month 31. That clears meaningfully more than unfurnished once it is running. It does not in year one, and an operator who needs it to will quit before it gets there. If you can eat an $11,400 outlay and a soft first year without it hurting, @brandonlee36, the March vacancy is a reasonable time to try. If the payback has to happen inside 24 months, list it unfurnished.