A mid-term unit sits vacant 47 days between placements and barely beats its long-term comp for the quarter

The relo falling through in February is the number that jumps out. Was that a direct corporate contact or did it come through a platform, and did you have any kill-fee or hold deposit baked into that booking?

Phoenix's medical district is brutal in January specifically because travel nurse contract cycles do not align cleanly with calendar months, which leaves operators chasing placements that are already filled. Take a comparable unit in Tempe modeling 20 percent vacancy that instead runs 61 percent vacant over a 10-week stretch because it leaned too hard on a single staffing agency that went quiet after Thanksgiving. That kind of gap can cost 3,200 dollars net against what a long-term tenant would have paid, on top of an 11,500 dollar furnishing cost that has not been depreciated yet. The part that hurts more than the vacancy itself is usually the applicant turned down two weeks earlier because a corporate placement looked locked in. What is worth pushing back on in this math is the furnishing cost sitting unaccounted for in the upside number. It typically takes 8 to 10 quarters of that margin just to break even on the fit-out before the mid-term strategy is actually ahead of the long-term comp on a total return basis.

The $14,000 furnishing number is where I'd push back first. I'm running two furnished units in Maricopa and Pinal counties and I've kept furnishing costs under $8,500 on both two-beds by sourcing through Facebook Marketplace and one estate sale liquidator I found in Mesa. Your $14k is not crazy for Phoenix proper but it stretches the payback period to the point where you basically need 18 months of outperformance just to justify the capital deployment, and that assumes the vacancy cooperates. My actual vacancy on mid-term has run closer to 28% annualized not the 15% I modeled either, so you're not alone on that gap, but 52% in a two-month window tells me the pipeline was running on two placements with nothing queued behind them. That's a sourcing problem more than a demand problem. One placement falls through and you've got nothing staged to backfill it, which is exactly what February showed you.

52% vacancy in two months means you were priced for a tenant who doesn't need you yet.

The part that stands out is that you had two completely different failure modes in the same quarter, a natural contract end gap and a last minute relo cancellation, and they landed back to back. That is closer to a worst case sequence than a representative sample. One quarter does not tell you your actual vacancy run rate, it tells you what happens when two bad things stack. The thing worth knowing is whether you had any pipeline or waitlist when those gaps opened, or whether you were starting from zero on the platforms each time.

The piece that doesn't get said until someone lives it: the 30-day minimum is doing real damage to your fill rate in a way that the 60-90 day placements hide. When a travel nurse contract ends on a random Tuesday in January and your next placement doesn't start until mid-February, you can't bridge that with a short vacation rental because your permit or your platform rules won't let you go under 30. So you sit. I've been running the numbers on a comparable two-bed in the Tempe medical corridor and the gap risk on sub-45-day windows is genuinely different from the gap risk on a 60-day placement, because the pool of people who need exactly 30 days is thin and their timelines are chaotic. The relo market specifically falls through late because corporate HR is slow and nobody tells the tenant until week three of a four-week notice window.

What I'd be looking at in your position is whether you can pre-negotiate a rate with one or two travel staffing agencies directly, even at a slight discount, just to have a standing commitment for their nurses rotating through that specific hospital system. Banner and Dignity Health both have vendor lists for housing in Phoenix and getting on one of those means you are hearing about placements three to four weeks out instead of scrambling on the platform. The gap math changes completely when you have 21 days of lead time instead of five. Your $1,850 net advantage basically disappears into one bad February like you just had, but it survives if you can cut average gap time from 23 days down to something like eight.