Unit 4 goes vacant in March. Pricing it furnished for corporate.

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?

@juniper yes, that's the standard, someone lands with a suitcase and cooks dinner that night.

@thicket your math treats vacant months as zero and that's right for rent but wrong for cost. Utilities keep running when the unit is empty, you can't 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, fine. But you left out the two weeks between the furniture arriving and the first booking, and you left out furniture wearing out. If the package lasts five years that's $2,280 a year of replacement, which eats more than the entire $1,900 spread. Your real question is whether corporate rent is $2,300 or $2,600.

@orchard that's circular though. Nobody books a unit that doesn't exist. Relocation coordinators want photos of the actual furnished unit and a date it's available. You can't sell them a plan.

There's a middle version. Buy the furniture used or on a rental agreement for the first six months, take the photos, see if the phone rings, then commit 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? I don't know whether an $11,400 package is a single expense or gets written down over years, and that changes your payback math a lot. That's a CPA question and I'd ask one before ordering rather than after.

Also, three weeks of vacancy unfurnished is a good record. I'd want to know what breaks that record before I trade 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, insurance placements after a house fire, people between closings. Same furniture, same premium over unfurnished, no relocation vendor packet. You give up some rate. You also give up the part where your income depends on relationships you haven't built yet.

I run one furnished unit out of eleven doors. Year one occupancy was 6.5 months, not ten. Year two was 9. The difference was entirely one property manager at a staffing outfit who started calling me directly, and I got her by driving over with a folder after four cold emails went nowhere.

My actual numbers on a slightly smaller unit: $2,150 a month, $265 utilities and internet, cleans at $190, and I replaced the sofa and one mattress in month 31. It clears meaningfully more than unfurnished now. It did not in year one and I would have quit if I'd needed it to.

@thicket if you can eat a $11,400 outlay and a soft first year without it hurting, the March vacancy is a reasonable time to try. If the payback has to happen inside 24 months, list it unfurnished.