The mid-term premium assumes a tenant pool that actually exists in your market, and that assumption is doing a lot of work.
The pitch makes sense on paper. A traveling nurse pays $2,800 a month furnished where a long-term tenant pays $1,900 unfurnished, and the gap covers the furniture, the vacancy, and the turnover. The math works when the demand source is real and recurring. Where it falls apart is when someone underwrites at the traveling nurse rate and the actual pool is thinner than expected, so the unit fills with relocating families every other cycle, insurance placements with seven-day-out clauses, and the occasional remote worker who found the listing through a Google search and expects a hotel experience.
Take a two-bedroom priced at $2,600 a month on a 30-day minimum. At 85% occupancy that is $26,520 annualized. The same unit long-term at $1,750 is $21,000. The gap is $5,520, and a furnished unit in that size range costs somewhere between $8,000 and $14,000 to set up and maintain across two or three years. The premium starts earning somewhere in year two if occupancy holds, but occupancy holding depends entirely on whether the demand source regenerates itself, which is a hospital contract renewal, a construction project extending, or a corporate relocation pipeline that did not dry up after one busy quarter.
The question I would ask before anything else is whether the demand in a given market comes from an institution that books repeatedly or from individuals who found the unit once. An institution has a coordinator, a preferred vendor list, and a recurring need. An individual found the place on Furnished Finder and will find somewhere cheaper next time. Those two sources produce very different occupancy curves over 24 months, and the underwriting should reflect which one actually dominates in the specific zip code.
What does the demand source look like in the market you're working in, and is any of it contracted or recurring?
