Furnished Rentals Blog

If you’re trying to rent out your furnished property, consider contacting event management companies in your city and letting them know it’s available. I was recently contacted by an event management company looking for 400 short-term furnished apartments to rent for 1 month during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Of course that’s an extreme situation, but large and small events are happening in all cities all the time, and people are out there looking for short-term furnished rentals, so make sure the event management companies in your city know about your property.

For the month of July, FurnishedRentals.com had 48,708 visitors.

That’s a 120% increase from the same month a year ago.

For the month of June, FurnishedRentals.com had 41,946 unique visitors!

It’s great to read all the emails from people who have been getting lots of renters through FurnishedRentals.com

It’s amazing how many people out there are looking for furnished apartments and houses to rent.

Over the past 2.5 years that FurnishedRentals.com has been online, I’ve occasionally received emails from people who own a property and are thinking of furnishing it and renting it out to people looking for a short-term rental.  They usually ask me the same thing….who is out there looking to rent furnished apartments and houses, and is there any demand for this type of rental in my area of the world?

Even though there are many many listings on FurnishedRentals.com, I still get emails every day from people all over the world asking me to help them find a furnished apartment or house to rent, usually from anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months.

When these people email me, I find it interesting that they often describe their situation, and why they need a short-term furnished rental.  I’ve noticed that they usually fall into certain categories.  There’s the retired people who are spending a month visiting their children or grand-children in another city and are looking to rent a furnished apartment to stay in.  There’s the people who are being sent to work in another city for a few months and want something more than a hotel room.  There’s the families who are relocating to another city or country and need a furnished house to live in while they look for a house to purchase.  There’s the people who are simply on vacation, and don’t want to stay in a hotel.  There’s people who will be going to a school in another city for month or two.  I’ve even got an email from a family who’s house burned down in a fire, and they needed a furnished house to rent in their own city while they get their life back together.

So if you’ve been wondering who rents short-term furnished apartments and houses, the answer is that a lot of people rent them for a lot of different reasons.  Make sure to keep this in mind when marketing your property, and try to target as many of these different groups as possible to maximize your success.

For the month of March, FurnishedRentals.com received 36,572 unique visitors!

That’s a lot of people looking to rent furnished apartments and houses.

Something I’ve noticed is that many of the furnished rental properties I see, look like they’re in a fairly new condo building.  There’s been a global building boom going on for the past few years and condos are being built everywhere, and people are buying them, furnishing them, then renting them out as furnished rentals.  Could it be that the boom in condo construction is driving the supply of furnished rental properties?  As more and more buildings are completed in the next few years, will we see a big increase in the number of furnished rental properties?

I was looking through some listings on FurnishedRentals.com and came across this furnished apartment in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

http://www.furnishedrentals.com/listing/5180.html

I clicked on the website link on the bottom of the listing, and was surprised to see a video on the main page of their website!  The video looks fairly proffesional, and it doesn’t just show the property they’re renting, it even has a few street scenes of Santa Fe.

Getting your property rented is all about getting people to fall in love with your property and making it irresistable to them.  I wasn’t even planning a trip to Santa Fe anytime soon, but after seeing that video, I might just have to bump it to the top of my priority list!

If anyone else has video on their rental property website, send me an email and let me know about it - info@furnishedrentals.com

If you have a property that you’re trying to keep rented, something you should definitely invest in are some good pictures of that property.  The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very true in this industry.  Most people rent short-term furnished apartments and houses without seeing them in-person first, so they need to be reassured about what they’re paying for, and being able to show them lots of great pictures is the best way of doing that.

I was once looking for a furnished apartment to rent in Sydney, Australia for 3 months, and I found a company that manages short-term furnished apartments in the city.  The company looked professional, they had a decent website, and the properties were all well described, but they only had one small fuzzy grainy photo of each of their properties.  I sent them an email letting them know I was interested, and asked if they had any more photos of their available properties they could send me, they replied and said they didn’t have any more.  Not surprisingly, I didn’t end up renting from them.  Their properties averaged about $3000 a month to rent, and I was telling them I’m looking to rent for 3 months, so that’s basically a $9000 sale for them, yet they couldn’t provide me with anything more than one small fuzzy grainy photo of the apartment?  Unfortunately, the lack of pictures is way too common in the furnished rentals industry.  It’s amazing that people can go and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a property, they can spend thousands furnishing the property, thousands advertising the property and yet they can’t take the time to snap a few decent pictures of the place.

Anyways, I’ll end this mini-rant by saying that if you haven’t already done so, either take some pictures of your property yourself or hire a professional photographer to do it.  It’s 2006, digital cameras are cheap, so there’s no excuse for not having some good pictures of your property.

Every day I get emails from people asking me if I can help them find a short-term furnished apartment or house to rent.  Many of these people are looking in cities.  You would think that looking for a furnished apartment or house to rent in a city would be easy, but it’s often not the case.  You can probably find 1000 short-term furnished rentals in a place like Lake Tahoe, but you’d have a hard time finding even 10 in Sacramento, California.  There are many people looking for short-term furnished rentals in cities, but it’s amazing how difficult it can be to find any.

I’ll try to post some interesting and relevant information here about the furnished rentals industry.