What best describes your situation?
Who books a furnished Texas home for 30 or more nights, who pays for it, and what a manager actually does between guests.
Furnished rental property management is the operation of a fully furnished single-family home let on stays of 30 nights or more, usually to corporate, relocation, or insurance-displaced guests. The manager holds the demand relationships, furnishes and maintains the home, and takes a percentage of collected rent. The owner supplies the asset and the furniture budget.
Most owners arrive at this question from the same place: a rental property that works, but works unremarkably. Long-term tenants hold rent near market, turnover arrives every year or two, and the return is fine without being interesting. The question is whether a different operating model changes the arithmetic enough to justify the switch.
This piece is our attempt to answer that honestly, including the parts that argue against it.
A long-term lease is a search problem. You list a home, a tenant finds it, and you sign twelve months. Income is predictable and low. Vacancy is rare but expensive when it happens, because refilling means starting the search over.
A short-term rental is a marketing problem. You compete for attention on a consumer platform, price against a moving market, and turn the property over dozens of times a year. Revenue is higher in good months and unreliable across a full year.
A midterm rental is a distribution problem. The guest does not find your home. An institution places them in it: a relocation company acting for an employer, or an insurance housing company acting on a claim. That distinction drives nearly everything else about how the asset behaves.
When an institution pays, the booking behaves institutionally. Lead times lengthen, price sensitivity falls, payment reliability rises, and stays extend for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the guest liked the kitchen.
Approximately 80% of our bookings come from insurance placements routed through insurance housing companies, and roughly 10% come from corporate relocation companies. We work with 40+ B2B partners across both.
Our position in the insurance chain is worth stating plainly, because it is often described incorrectly. The insurance housing companies are our customers. They hold the relationship with the carrier and the adjuster; we are their housing supplier in Texas. We do not place families directly on behalf of carriers.
We explain the full channel structure in how insurance housing works in Texas.
Owners in our program typically earn 2–3x the cash flow of an equivalent long-term rental. That figure gets quoted often enough that it is worth decomposing, because the multiple is not a rate premium.
A furnished home commands a higher monthly rate than the same home unfurnished. That is the visible half. The half owners underestimate is occupancy. Our portfolio runs around 80% average occupancy, and it does so because roughly 90% of demand arrives through partner channels rather than open-market search. A home earning a strong rate for seven months of the year can easily net less than a home earning a moderate rate for ten.
As a principle: annual return is a rate multiplied by an occupancy, and the second term is the one an owner cannot influence alone.
| Measure | What we run | Why it matters to an owner |
|---|---|---|
| Average occupancy | Around 80% | The multiplier on your nightly rate |
| Rent collection rate | 99.4% | Institutional payers, not individual credit risk |
| Eviction rate | Under 0.5% | The failure mode long-term owners fear most |
| Time to first Rental Agreement | 30–40 days from installation | How long your furniture capital sits idle |
| Annual rent growth | 7% | Rates reset at every placement, not every 12 months |
| Owners who add a second property | 26% | The honest revealed-preference number |
The last row is the one we would look at first if we were the owner rather than the manager. Marketing claims are cheap; repeat capital commitment is not.
Our management fee is 25% of collected rent. That is higher than a long-term property manager charges, and the comparison is fair to raise. A long-term manager is running a lease and a maintenance queue. A midterm manager is also running the demand side: partner relationships, compliance paperwork, insurance certificates, placement response times, furnishing, turnovers between every stay, and inspections after each one.
The furniture package is the larger decision, because it is capital rather than a fee. It is spent up front, it is specific to this model, and it is the cost an owner cannot recover if they change their mind in year one. Any honest version of this comparison starts there.
We run a 400+ photo inspection after every guest checkout. Damage gets classified and reported within one to four days rather than discovered months later, and payouts run four to fourteen days. Roughly 80% of our homes sit within five miles of a team member, which is what makes same-day response possible rather than aspirational.
We also carry a 90-day vacancy termination clause: if we cannot place your home within 90 days, you can exit the agreement. We offer that because the alternative is asking owners to trust a distribution claim they have no way to verify in advance.
Three honest disqualifiers, because an owner deciding this from a blog post deserves the exclusions before the pitch.
The property is too small or in the wrong place. Our demand is concentrated in single-family homes sized for displaced families and relocating households. A one-bedroom condo downtown faces a different demand picture entirely, and our partner channels will not fill it.
The HOA prohibits it. Some Texas HOAs restrict lease terms under twelve months. This is checkable before any money is spent, and we check it during evaluation.
The submarket is saturated. Partner demand in a given submarket is finite. When we already have enough inventory in an area, adding another home lengthens everyone's vacancy rather than adding revenue. We decline homes on this basis, and an owner should be suspicious of a manager who never does.
The occupancy and collection figures above are ours, drawn from our own portfolio of 150+ homes across DFW, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. They are not a Texas market average, and we cannot tell you what a different operator would produce with the same house.
The 2–3x cash flow range is also wide for a reason. Where a specific property lands inside it depends on submarket, home size, furnishing quality, and how much long-term rent the property was already commanding. An owner should treat the range as a reason to run their own numbers, not a substitute for doing so.
No. We work with owners to furnish and prepare the home before marketing, and most owners use our furnishing process rather than sourcing independently. The capital is still the owner's, but the specification and installation are not left to you to guess at.
Generally not. Most municipal short-term rental rules in Texas metros are written around stays under 30 nights. A 30-night minimum sits outside them. City rules change, so this is worth confirming for a specific address rather than assuming.
The listing is the same; the demand is not. A consumer marketplace reaches individuals searching and paying for themselves. Insurance and relocation placement reaches institutions with procurement requirements that a single-property owner cannot satisfy. We break the four channels down in how a furnished midterm rental actually gets filled.
Vacancy is the owner's exposure in this model, which is why the 90-day termination clause exists. There is no rent guarantee, and any operator offering one is making a promise their demand cannot support.
We notify owners when a lease is signed and transfer funds within three days of receipt.
Texas Corporate Homes manages premium furnished single-family homes across DFW, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio, covering roughly two-thirds of the state's population. We have been operating since 2015 and managing properties for outside owners since 2019.
If you want to know whether a specific property fits, see the owner program or email leasing@staytch.com. Evaluation costs nothing and the answer is sometimes no.
