What best describes your situation?
The employer pays, a relocation management company books, and the employee occupies. Three parties, three definitions of a good outcome.
Corporate relocation housing is furnished accommodation an employer funds for a transferring employee, usually for one to six months, while the employee finds permanent housing. In Texas it is typically booked through a relocation management company rather than by the employee, which makes it an institutional channel with procurement rules rather than a consumer one.
About 10% of our bookings come from corporate relocation companies. It is our second-largest channel after insurance placement, and it behaves differently enough from the first that it is worth explaining on its own terms.
The chain has more links in it than most owners expect. An employer sets a relocation policy with a housing allowance and a duration. A relocation management company administers that policy across every transferring employee. That company either books accommodation directly or through a corporate housing supplier. We sit at the supply end of that chain.
This matters because it determines what wins the booking. A relocation management company is answerable to a corporate client for consistency across dozens of moves. They buy from suppliers who can cover a metro, produce insurance certificates and invoices that pass an accounts payable review, and hold a rate for a quarter. A single owner with one attractive house cannot meet those requirements, which is the real reason this channel is hard to reach alone.
As a principle: institutional demand is bought through procurement, not through marketing. The listing is not the product; the ability to supply repeatedly and predictably is.
| Option | Works for | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Extended-stay hotel | A single employee on a short assignment | A family of four for four months, with no kitchen and no yard |
| Furnished apartment | A single employee or a couple | Families with children, pets, and a school district requirement |
| Furnished single-family home | Relocating families on 1–6 month bridges | Solo employees on 30-day assignments, where it is more house than needed |
| Signing a twelve-month lease early | Nobody, in practice | Commits the employee to a neighborhood before they have seen the city |
The last row is the one relocation policies exist to prevent. An employee who signs a year-long lease in their first week has usually chosen a neighborhood from a map, and a meaningful share of them want to move again within six months. The bridge stay exists so that the permanent housing decision is made with local knowledge.
Relocation demand concentrates around employment centers and follows corporate expansion rather than weather. In practice that means the DFW corporate corridor, Houston's central business district and energy employers, north Austin, and San Antonio. It runs year-round with a rise around the start of school years, when families time moves to a school calendar.
The families are the part owners should understand. A transferring executive with children needs three or four bedrooms, a real kitchen, a washer and dryer, and a location inside a school district they are considering. That is a house, not an apartment, and furnished houses are the scarce item in every one of these metros.
Relocation is a complement to insurance placement rather than a replacement for it. Insurance displacement is our largest channel at roughly 80% of bookings and it arrives with hours of notice. Relocation arrives with weeks of notice and fills calendar that emergency placement cannot plan around. Holding both is what produces 80% average occupancy over multi-year periods across our portfolio.
What relocation demand asks of a property is unremarkable and specific: a three or four-bedroom single-family home, in a neighborhood a relocating family would accept without complaint, in a school district that appears on their search list, with HOA covenants that permit a lease under twelve months. We accept roughly 20% of the properties we evaluate, and HOA lease-term minimums are the most common reason for the other 80%.
Our fee is 25% of collected rent, so a vacant month bills you nothing. Collection runs 99.4% and evictions stay under 0.5%, against 5% to 10% on traditional long-term rentals, which follows from the fact that an institution signs the agreement. If a home sits vacant 90 consecutive days you can terminate at no cost.
Relocation volume tracks corporate hiring, and corporate hiring is cyclical. In a year when transfers slow, this channel thins and the insurance channel carries more of the load. That is a real argument for a manager who holds both, and an argument against underwriting a property on relocation demand alone.
We also do not publish a per-metro breakdown of the relocation channel. The 10% figure is portfolio-wide. Any claim that your specific submarket produces relocation demand at that rate would be a guess, and we would rather say so than dress one up.
One to six months, with extensions common. Home searches run longer than relocation policies assume, so a 60-day booking frequently becomes 90 or 120.
Usually the relocation management company or the employer, which is why collection risk on this channel looks nothing like collection risk on a consumer booking.
Reaching relocation management companies directly is difficult for a single property, because they buy on metro coverage, insurance certificates, and invoicing that survives an accounts payable review. We explain how the institutional channels work in how a furnished midterm rental actually gets filled.
Corporate housing is the broader category, covering any furnished accommodation supplied to a business. Relocation housing is the subset funded by an employer for a transferring employee.
Texas hotel occupancy tax generally applies to stays under 30 days, and relocation stays are almost always longer. Confirm for a specific address and length. We cover the structure in midterm rentals and Texas occupancy taxes.
Texas Corporate Homes manages 150+ premium furnished single-family homes across DFW, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio, with 40+ B2B partnerships across insurance housing and corporate relocation companies. We have been operating since 2015 and managing properties for outside owners since 2019.
If you own a single-family home in one of those four metros, see the owner program or email leasing@staytch.com. If your submarket is saturated we will tell you.
