Why I created the website

I was traveling from Sydney, Australia to Vancouver, Canada, and was looking online for a furnished apartment to rent while in Vancouver. It was a frustrating search. I kept wishing I could find a central website where all the owners of furnished rental properties could post their available rentals.

A neglected niche

Websites like Apartments.com and Rent.com are well known as websites to find unfurnished rentals, but I didn't find them to be very useful when it comes to furnished rentals. I was able to find hundreds of websites that listed rentals, but I kept getting disappointed in how they were simply full of unfurnished rentals that required long leases. Not what I was looking for, but there wasn't much of an alternative, because I couldn't find any websites that focused on just the furnished rentals industry.

As I learned more about the furnished rental industry, I realized that furnished rentals are much different than unfurnished rentals; one of the main differences is that furnished rentals are often only rented short-term, sometimes only a few days. Whether for business travelers on an extended stay, people on holiday looking for a vacation rental, or just people who prefer to rent furnished instead of unfurnished properties, I realized there was a significant number of people that needed help to find the available furnished rentals out there, and they needed a website dedicated to furnished rentals to help them do it.

A website is born!

From the first day I bought the name www.furnishedrentals.com, I started getting emails from people asking me if I could help them find furnished apartments and houses to rent in various places all over the world. I hadn't even built the website yet, but I was getting emails from people like myself who needed help. It was these emails that really encouraged me to get the website finished and open to the world.

I launched FurnishedRentals.com in late January 2005. On the day it launched, the website had no listings. I know what you're thinking, not a very useful site! It was a little anti-climactic, so I went to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I checked the website and to my surprise someone had actually found it and created a listing! It was incredible, I had just launched the website the day before, you couldn't even find it in any search engines yet, but someone did find it (probably by typing in www.furnishedrentals.com) and they actually created a listing! The next day, another person registered and created the second listing. Wow, this internet thing really works! Anyways, it has continued on like that, every day more and more people register and create listings, and since I launched the website, it has grown from zero visitors to over 48,000 unique visitors a month!

If you ever have a question about FurnishedRentals.com or the furnished rentals industry in general, feel free to send me an email.

My name is Dave, and my email address is: info@furnishedrentals.com