Almost every place where short-term rentals are illegal or capped or regulated is at the basis a monthly rental. Like it becomes legal at 30 days. But here was a company with over 200,000 listings growing like a weed, really serving this interesting niche and it, we’ve got more inventory than either CoStar or Zillow, and we’ve got more 30 day plus inventory than Airbnb.

Airbnb found a niche exploited at. And became a behemoth. Welcome back to the Churchill Rental Riches Podcast. I’m really happy you’re here again, and we have a fabulous episode for you today. We’re with Jeff Hurst, the CEO of Furnish Finder. Jeff’s got a ton of experience. He was with HomeAway. For a decade.

He was later the president of VRBO and afterwards was the COO for Expedia. So a ton of experience. Jeff, really excited to dig into the details with you today. Welcome to the show. Thrilled to be here. And thanks for all you do for the category. Yeah. Gosh you’re with Furnish Finder now.

We’ve talked about Furnish Finder before on the. Channel a really great tool for getting more midterm rentals. But why don’t we just back up a step because before that you were with Expedia, you were their COO. Can you fill us in just with a few details there? Yeah. My short term rental career basically began in 2010.

I joined HomeAway when it was a private company, was on the strategy team. Worked my way through HomeAway, helped with our transition to e-commerce. Was eventually the Chief Strategy Officer and helped sell the company to Expedia. I stayed on after the acquisition and was the chief commercial officer, basically our general manager, and running all the sales teams for almost five years after that, became the president of VRBO and had that role up until early in the pandemic when we reorganized and I became the, marketing for a brief period, but became the COO of Expedia brands. And I’ve been around a long time and seen a lot of the short-term rental game. I actually have three short-term rentals on my own. I self-managed one on a lake LBJ outside of Austin for seven years before getting a property manager, but also have a beach property in South Padre with a manager and a ranch property outside of Gonzalez with a manager.

And I’ve definitely been, just eating the dog food along the way and learning the game and the the categories changed so much. And the competitors have come and competitors have gone. And the, Airbnb’s changed immensely. Vrbo maybe a little less and joining Furnish Finder was really an extension of I see trends that are emerging in the economy and in the category that really made this an exciting moment.

To do something the most fo familiar and in some sense, I think was a opportunity to do things better the second time around. So was seeing that trend, that midterm rentals, the growth and midterm rentals, was that part of your reason for joining First Fin? Yeah, absolutely.

There were a few things in the decision process. So first of all, I left Expedia and really didn’t think I’d get back into travel. I wanted to be a CEO for the next gig. I didn’t think it was that likely. I’d find something that was as enjoyable as what I did. Took a year off and got introduced to the founders of Furnish Finder.

I couldn’t believe this company existed like I could, like I had never heard of it. Most people probably still have them, especially of our best efforts, but here was a company with over 200,000 listings, this throwback subscription model that felt just like VRBO in 2005. Actually it was cheaper than VRBO was even in 2005, growing like a weed.

And really serving this interesting niche. And it reminded me a little bit of a handful of things. One, it reminded me how Airbnb was in this niche that homeboy didn’t care about. That niche was urban room rentals. It was a much lower price point. We didn’t think it was gonna be possible to make money.

We thought it was gonna be a regulatory headache, and Airbnb found a niche, exploited it, and became a behemoth. That’s probably got more to do with luxury now than it does with, affordable room rentals. So that was the first thing I saw there. The second thing was, the US obviously has a housing shortage and it also has, a very, relatively high interest rate compared to the recent past.

There’s an affordability crisis. So furnish midterm rentals are solving two things there. They’re solving for someone who can’t afford to buy, but they’re also solving for someone who can’t afford to buy furniture. And furniture’s a really frequently a pretty terrible investment. And so it’s a interesting opportunity to help do some societal good.

And the third thing is short-term rentals have had a regulatory headwind forever. Basically since Airbnb got into it, and that headwind is actually the midterm rental tailwind, almost every place where short-term rentals are illegal or capped or regulated is at the basis a monthly rental. It becomes legal at 30 days.

Yeah. Excellent points. Yeah. The regulation one, that’s, we’re definitely seeing a lot about that and we’ve talked about furnish finder before on this channel. We’ve talked about midterm rentals before, but maybe for those that are tuning in that haven’t heard furnace finder before, what’s the main difference between an Airbnb and A-V-R-B-O and furnace fiber?

Yeah I describe it as we’re in a valley between these peaks. The peaks on one side are Airbnb, booking.com and vrbo, and they cater to short term leisure travelers. Average length of stay, would typically be around five days. It’s a typically a pretty important experience.

It somebody’s spring break, it’s often somebody’s, three night getaway and so they’re willing to splurge a little bit more on it. And you’re mainly competing with hotels. And really the short-term rental value proposition for a long time was more for less. Now I think it’s probably more for same.

But that, that’s really what you’re competing against. Those companies, Airbnb’s worth $70 billion. booking.com, $150 billion. Expedia, $30 billion, like huge organizations On the opposite side, you’ve got Zillow, you’ve got the CoStar group with Rep, which runs, homes.com, apartments.com.

Those, those marketplaces, they’re really focused on year plus. Product different business model, but they also offer furnished monthly rentals. And in the middle there’s us. And so we’re this niche of, flexible leases starting at a month. And we’re furnished. We’ve got more inventory than either CoStar or Zillow.

We’ve got more 30 day plus inventory than Airbnb. They have more inventory overall obviously, but most of it is that kind of I call it like the TE game, where you might need to book three different places if you’re trying to stay four months. They built some features to facilitate that, but people are really trying to make a higher nightly rate on shorter stays.

So we’ve got this thing in the middle. What’s the most different about it is really, I think it’s like the original internet promise where we’re a classified site. You pay us $179 a year and then we turn, we power inquiries, put your phone number out. We’re giving you the control for who you wanna book, how you want to book, how they wanna pay, no commission, no service fees.

And so it’s different, it’s a little more work, but you also keep a lot more of the money and have a lot more control over how when you book and we think it’s the appropriate model. For that niche, because if you’re booking on Airbnb or VRBO and paying, whether it’s a service fee or commission, it doesn’t really matter.

It’s coming outta somebody’s budget, but you might be paying 10%. Say you’re a traveling nurse, nine months, a year, it works out to over a week’s take home pay. You’re willing to do some work to not pay that platform fee, and we wanna provide that service. Yeah, great point. From the guest perspective, those fees definitely add up.

We’ve done a lot of midterm rentals before. I’ve also done long-term rentals, so I’m on the all sides of it. And I think one of the things for me that. Is been a little trickier and I’d love to hear your input and where you guys see this going is it is and you mentioned this before the call, like mid farm rentals, kinda like Airbnb was like, in 2008, like it’s a new trend and there’s maybe not as many tools built to help us facilitate these types of rentals.

There are challenges potentially, when a guest becomes a tenant. So quite a few things there, but why don’t you pick one and we’ll run with it. First of all, the the tools perspective is why we’re here. This is not a this is a known problem space. You’ve had, you had Marcus from host away on, you frequently mentioned a lot of the different providers.

This is not an unsolvable problem. We just have to go build it. And so most of my tenure year, which is almost two years now, has been hiring a technical team to rebuild our platform so that we can start to integrate with, the Hostway, the Guesties, the host police, but also the players on the long-term side.

Now the Turbo tenants, the Rent Readies, and just make it easier. There’s no reason this should be this hard. We’re not trying to make it hard. We just have to rebuild our architecture so that we can make it easier for people to connect, serve messages, serve rates, and power better availability, and get the content in.

And so we’re going to do that. We’re working on it. I expect by the end of next year we will have made a whole lot of progress on it, but there were things we had to do first to fix the technology so we could be ready for it. I would expect parity there. With the exception of.

I don’t think it’s as much of an instant book category. I think the booking cycle feels more like long term. Someone’s gonna be there for, on average over 90 days. They often wanna FaceTime tour her or they wanna actually talk to the landlord frequently, and like very frequently way, double digit percentage.

They wanna visit the place and look around and that is not at all compatible with vrbo, Airbnb, and Bookings business model. Because it’s too easy to get around a commission when you do that, which is why Zillow and CoStar don’t have that model for rentals except on the multifamily side. So we think we’ll end up somewhere in the middle there, and we just want to go really fast and build parody tools so that people can, but they’re inventorying the channel and and make it, basically make it more viable.

That’s where we’re going with it. I know that was the first part of your question. What was the second part again? Tim? Regulations. So from the tenant or guest perspective, when someone has landlord or a tenant. Tenant. Yeah. I The I think it is. It’s an issue. I don’t think it is a it’s not something we hear a lot about because the tenant rights aren’t sneaking up on you like they do in a short term terminal.

You have a signed lease, you have done a tenant screening. You have frequently met them in person. You have managed the payments in a different method than that. They’re being held by Airbnb or VRBO and hopefully coming to you at some point in time. And so I don’t think the tenant rights is any trickier than on the long term side.

And what I think might makes it a little bit, probably less risky than long term is that. The tenant profile of someone who’s staying through Furnish Finder is a different profile than someone who’s living there, has a permanent resident. So in order, our top category, and this has changed a lot from where people might have tried Furnish Finder two, three years ago in the pandemic, the platform was basically all traveling medical professionals.

That’s how we grew up. It’s not that way anymore. Over a third of our travelers are corporate, and that’s some combination of skilled trade, maybe building data centers or sky rises. And then it’s also more we’re a white collar, it’s a traveling salesperson, it’s an entrepreneur. It’s somebody who’s relocating for consulting.

So that’s over a third. The next biggest use case is traveling medical. That’s about a quarter of it. The next use case is actually relocating families. And this is the fastest growing and I think the most interesting because it’s someone who might be moving from from Arizona to Austin.

They don’t know the neighborhoods housing’s expensive right now. They may not wanna move their furniture twice and so they’re gonna rent a place in the school district they like for six months and then look to buy. And that’s growing over a hundred percent year on year. And so that dynamic is changing a lot.

And then the last use case is really academic, and it’s mainly grad students and professors. They have to move around a lot, especially professors, and they’re on a budget. And so when you think about those tenant types. It’s definitely a different risk profile than one. The bachelorette party, which is who bachelor, bachelorette party, or extended family reunion on the short-term side.

But it’s also a different risk profile than a long-term tenant who we may be more worried about, basically squatters rights or are they gonna leave because in general. The majority of furnish finder attendants are definitely trying to leave. They’re there for a defined period of time for a contract and they’re on a stipend and then they want to go home.

Great insights. It’s always really interesting hearing the data points and how things change over time. And so yeah, we haven’t had any issues with furnish finder. In fact, most all of our midterm rentals we have. Had really good results. I think the challenge for some people out there though, that are considering midterm rentals coming from the short term rental world is that.

Don’t do the background chat. What would you say to those folks? You gotta do it. I think that’s all there is to it. I don’t encourage people to be many of our most successful customers are single channel with furnace finder. Many of our customers come from the short term side, and they’re not spending enough time on two things.

The first thing is. Is midterm actually a good idea for this? And a lot of short term properties, it’s just not a fit. A five bedroom on 30 A is not a great fit for most of the use cases I just described. And so you’ve gotta be sure, one, you’ve got a property and price point that works. You’ve gotta really think through who’s my customer and how I’m gonna do it.

But the second thing is you’ve gotta have a slightly different operating. You’ve gotta be more willing to engage and talk to people, not just to market your property and get ’em in the door, but also to be sure they’re right for your property. And then to do the things that help it be. Secure for you. And that’s definitely a tenant screening.

It’s often a credit check and it’s definitely assigned lease. And so we power products to make those things easier. But you’ve gotta embrace a different workflow. And we’ve had some of the largest short-term managers have done pilots with us. And I think the main reason it didn’t work was because it was incompatible with their internal operating model.

And that’s gonna be some of the discord that, managers work through. And I think the smaller managers, and especially the FBOs, are gonna be more nimble in how they embrace that. And make this possible. And then the tech and the tools, and frankly our platform will catch up to make it easier.

But you’ve gotta treat the booking process more like a long term because you know that that tenant risk is. More like long term, it just is, which Sure. Totally agree. Totally agree. Curious your thoughts on, you mentioned the different sort of profiles, guest profiles, the corporate travelers, travel nurses, which is, what you guys started with.

And then also some short-term rental operators where it didn’t really work and maybe that’s because the properties didn’t fit. Do you see certain types of properties that just do a much better job on furnish finder? Is it like urban or can. Do you have any other survey insights around that?

Think about the obviously I know VRBO and Furnish Finder best. I always said VRBO was best at Lakes, rivers, beaches, mountains, and then Urban Core, is it close to downtown? Is it Austin East side? Is it a place where there’s a ton of leisure activity?

The use case, we always talk about complex family. It was typically either large groups of friends, four couples, or it was three generations. It was grandparents, parents, and kids. And so you were serving typically five to seven nights, typically five plus people. And I’d say the Sweet Plus was sweet spot was three or more bedrooms with some interesting amenities, foosball, table pickleball, multiple TVs, great view, whatever that looks like.

Getting, the weekly rate would’ve been on average, probably somewhere between 20 503,000. So think about that on one side. Now think about furnish finder. The average tenant is gonna be closer to two people. I think it’s actually about 1.8. 70% of our inventory is two bedrooms or less, and we do not do well on lakes and rivers and beaches and ski out.

It’s around hospitals. It’s around good school districts. It’s around commuter corridors. And it’s in a lot of places that I’d call our small mid cities or suburbs where there are not as many leisure options or hotel options. So a lot of what we compete with, I’d say a good barometer. How close are you to an extended stay America?

How close are you to one of the extended stay properties for Marriott or Hilton that’s designed for somebody trying to stay 30 days or more? And if there’s one of those nearby. Which are frequently 2,500, $3,000 a month instead of a week. Can you provide a way better value with your studio or one bedroom than a, 610 foot efficiency apartment that doesn’t have an oven?

Usually you can’t. You can actually usually make a lot of money on a duplex or a quadplex and one of these tertiary markets compared to that hotel model. That’s what feels like 2010 to me, is that, in 2010, short terms were three bedroom houses competing with a Hilton, and it was like 40% less money for 50% more space and privacy, and you save money.

That’s what midterm feels like right now. But you can’t plug and play any short term with a pickleball that has a slow season and say, I’ll make it a midterm. I hope it works out. Like maybe, but you just can’t count on that every time. I actually see more success with people coming from long-term to midterm.

It’s just, there’s less of it because they’ve gotta buy the furniture. Yeah. That brings up another question, obviously you can go on furnished Finder, you can see what local properties might be renting for. You can go on Zillow, and check the furnish box and see what furnished properties on Zillow might be running for.

But if there’s someone out there and they have their long-term rentals, maybe they’re near hospitals, like what would be your advice to them on. Whether or not they should try the furnish finder or furnish rental model, a midterm rental model versus leaving as long-term? Yeah, my two things, one we publish a lot of content also, so we’ve got a podcast called Landlord Diaries, and we recently did an episode with Price Labs and we’ve also done a lot of episodes on long-term conversion.

So I’d encourage people to just learn more. The cheapest way to dip your toe in the water is to put your unfurnished property unfurnished finder. And in the description, write that you’re gonna furnish it for the first tenant. Just tell them, Hey, if you sign a 90 day lease, we’ll furnish this for you and describe what you’re gonna furnish.

And then. It’s, you do turn off a few tenants because they’re wondering how serious you are, but you bring in quite a few more who maybe they really need a two bedroom, but in the second bedroom they’re gonna try and have two or three kids. ’cause it’s a relocating family and they wanna bunk with a trundle and that would be pretty uncommon and a lot of our and, but you’d be able to solve that for ’em and so they get a little bit more control over it.

The other way is you can rent furniture. And then the third way is you can, basically call landlords on furnish finder nearby and ask what their experience is and how it’s going. And use our stats page to learn more. For, I’d say most serious real estate investors, this is not like furnishing a short-term rental.

This is a fraction of the outfit cost. You’re usually doing it for way less than $10,000 to fully furnish the midterm rental. And, you’re paying that back within a year, and then you’re making, 30 to 50% more rent than a long term. Until the furniture needs to be fixed or replaced, which is usually years it’s a great payback if you’ve got the right place.

And, for the tenant type you’re looking for. Great suggestions there. Yeah, I think just in general, there’s just a lot more flexibility with it. The standards aren’t completely set like they might be in Airbnb. So let’s imagine someone decides to put the property up, you mentioned price lapse there and pricing becomes.

A little more tricky because in my opinion, short-term rentals, we’re dynamically pricing those every day. The prices are changing and in a long-term rental you’ve got a pretty much fixed price and it equals your neighbors. But midterm still in the middle there, and there is some difference and maybe there’s some seasonality or some peak periods.

And Price Labs does have a few options in there to help price better for midterm rentals. But do you have any just suggestions on determining the best pricing? The biggest thing I’d say is it’s a. While it’s tricky, it’s nowhere near as complicated. And a couple things. I listened to your you did some wonderful midterm rental episodes.

I think it was 2 0 3, 2 11 and two 12 to catch up your viewers. But one of the things I think you may be, has changed a little bit that I’d clarify is that there’s not really a forward rates dynamic in monthly. The most successful people in monthly rentals are taking a rental at a time. And so if you’re using it as a short term and you’re trying to fill a shoulder season in Michigan, you know you need to really think through what’s the right rate, because you’re gonna block the calendar and take that booking.

But for people who are midterm only. You’re really doing it, one booking at a time. And the reason for that is over 50% of midterm rental leases extend. And so you don’t wanna have, something that’s booked 10 days out or somebody that’s coming in for a week, 10 days out. You really want to be in a position to where you’ve got a conversation ongoing with your tenant and you know when they’re gonna check out and you’ve got 20 to 30 days notice to lease up so you can book it.

Two days after they check out. And so you’re really, if you’re doing this well, you’re picking a price four times a year. And so four times a year you’re going in there and looking three to four weeks out and using a tool like Price Labs or I think more frequently using Furnish Finder and seeing what people’s rates are and whether you think you can charge more or less.

And just picking the price point. You don’t have the same, I always when I get in fights with my property managers, it’s because I think they mispriced to peak date. It’s oh, how did you let this book for this date? Seven months out? You should have known there was a music festival and now we’re stuck with it and we could have done better.

And that dynamic doesn’t exist in midterms. Because you get to look out and say, okay, I’m comfortable with a monthly rate of what starting in three weeks. And you might need to think about are you really gonna be disappointed if they book for nine months instead of three? Probably not. That probably feels quite a victory in the midterm rental game.

And we wanna build, whether it’s Price Labs or Wheelhouse or Beyond pricing or whoever we wanna partner with people to where they can help solve this problem, but is a much simpler problem because of the nature of how the calendar works. Someone’s decided, yep, I want to try this out.

I wanna put my property up as a midterm rental. I can furnish it. You know the difference between them being more profitable as a midterm rental than a long-term rental. Sometimes could come down to a month or maybe a couple months. One of the challenges with midterm rentals is that they are a minimum of a month, and so we wanna have really good communication with the person staying there, so we know when they’re checking out.

But any other suggestions around trying to minimize those gaps? Yeah, especially if you’re in a place where there is like a 30 night minimum. You don’t want someone to book on day 29, for example. And how the 20 Yeah. If you, this is the reason you have a lease. And so your lease needs to have terms around how much notice they need to provide and what the penalties are if they provide less.

And you need to have a mechanism to enforce the penalties. And typically I’d say that you’re if you’re collecting rent three days before the term ends, you’ve got more risk. You either need to be collecting rent earlier or have a deposit, or really gotten to know the tenant well enough to where you understand the risk so that you’ve always got the tenant there giving you enough notice to where you’ve got, I think, I think three weeks is pretty sufficient.

Four weeks ideal for at least that period. And so the most important thing is you’re gonna be able to talk to this person. It’s not gonna be an instant booking, unless it comes from Airbnb. And so you’re gonna be able to talk to ’em, you’re gonna be able to set the terms, you’re gonna have a lease, and you’re gonna have the money in your bank account.

And that, I’d say, prevents most of it. The separate thing is that you need to have done your homework on what is the seasonality. If you assume in a low scenario you’re making 25% more than in long term, you can still lose months of writ and end up better off in the average scenario where you’re more like 30 to 50% more.

Same thing. What we hear from landlords is they’re typically more than 90% plus occupied, and the really good ones are, not occupied 10 days a year. They’re really on top of this and managing it so that the occupancy’s way more like long term, and vastly superior to short term, and you’re using those tools to understand.

How the cash flow is gonna help you manage the calendar instead of what I feel is often the case on short term, where really price is your lever. I’m gonna go discount heavily. I’m gonna run a promo. I’m gonna reach out to my repeats because I’ve got a vacancy, I’ve got a cancellation, I’ve got a book.

Yet you don’t have near so much of that. Basically hair on fire dynamic with midterms. Yeah, great point, Tina. So the lease can go a long way in preventing those gaps, if you have that three, three week period or making sure that you have enough notice if they do wanna extend another situation that might complicate things a little bit curious to, to hear what you think about places where midterm rentals can do really well.

But only for a certain season like snowbirds coming down to Florida, for example. Yeah, I think Florida’s a good use case, Florida doesn’t have Michigan to me is the perfect use case. Michigan has a wonderful summer, has a wonderful summer and a miserable winter in terms of tourism demand.

And so that’s one where the trade off is more obvious of you can move into a midterm mode in a lot of Michigan for the right profile house, and really you’re replacing something that’s closer to nothing. As to, in Florida, there’s almost always something, and so you’re replacing a different type of something.

And so in Florida, I think it’s more of a pricing problem. And in Florida, when you’re in that low season on Airbnb, I don’t know that you’re necessarily setting your. Minimum nights to 30, so much as you’re using a tool like Price Labs or whoever to try and solve the algorithm. And you might box your calendar out for a handful of months and see if you can get the long-term unfun finder.

And if it’s not working out, you’ve gotta look in the mirror and say, should I unbox it? Would I rather have 20 books days out of the next 90? Then maybe not. Get the midterm I’m hoping for. And so if you approach it that way, then it’s really an exercise in keeping yourself honest.

And I think that furnish finder, for us, I didn’t mention leisure and my tenant types. It’s single digit. It would probably be fifth after academic. And when it’s there, it’s usually someone who might have found it on Airbnb or VRBO and doesn’t wanna pay the fee and is looking on furnish finder to see if they can book it cheaper and book it direct, which is a great backup plan for most short-term rental owners.

It’s a way to go be found and there’s a lot of tools that help people find them. And so I think if you’re, if you know you’ve got a core demographic like corporate, like medical, like academic or a neighborhood with schools where you might more have digital nomad relocating families, way more viable.

If you’re just dipping your toe in the water, I think you just have to be more pragmatic. As a, as an observation, I have a place in South Texas on the beach. I never have it as a 30 day minimum. There’s enough demand in the winter that I’m gonna do better as a short term, even though I’ll have more vacancy and it’s a four bedroom, so it’s not a perfect fit for us.

But here I am with the property running the company. It’s not always a fit. I think, data most of the time can help us answer most of these questions. If it makes sense for us to rent as a midterm route for us to switch our minimum nights stay strategy. You mentioned some stats there.

Can you update us on how many units Furnish Finder has now and how that’s been growing, and then also maybe some places or ways that, someone interested might be able to get their hands on a little bit more data For sure. If you go to furnish finder.com/stats and you can also find it from the top N of the website under about monthly rentals or landlord resources, we provide, every city in the US and we’re US only.

Inventory. Every city in the US we pro provide a experience that tells you how many searches are happening, what’s the distribution of bedroom count, those sorts of things. Honestly, right now, if you’re watching this September, October of 25, it’s a it’s not the experience I want it to be.

We’re rebuilding it and we want to be able to provide a lot more information on what tenants are coming and what’s the ratio of supply and demand and like to help you understand if it’s a better fit. Because, if you’re searching for Atlanta. Atlanta’s big. It doesn’t quite give you enough information yet as to which neighborhood’s gonna work, but it’s a great indicator.

So I encourage people to start there. I encourage people to look at similar properties on a short-term site. Then I encourage people to look at the hotel dynamic. How many midterm extended stay hotels are nearby on an Expedia or booking.com and start to calibrate. And when you’re looking at Varnish Finder, you, I think you’ll be surprised because it feels more like 2010.

We, we post phone numbers, call a landlord and ask them, Hey, this house looks just like mine. What’s your experience been? I’m thinking about doing this. They may see you as competition and tell you to bug off. There’s a good chance they’re actually gonna say, Hey, this has been great for me and here’s what I’ve learned and maybe there’s some things we can partner on.

Let’s talk about it. Awesome. A lot of people tune into the show, our growing their portfolios, maybe their property managers, they’re looking to scale. What would you say to someone that’s looking to scale in the midterm rental space? Any tips, suggestions there? Yeah, I think the good news on looking to scale versus short term.

There’s a couple advantages in midterm in my mind. One advantage the price point’s typically lower, because you’re looking at things that are often studio one, bedroom, two bedroom, and important to note. We’ve got, of our 300,000 plus listings, 60,000 are rooms. Like individual room listings in a house.

And maybe I’ll start with, if you’re going from zero to one, this is a really interesting way to start making cash and get started because it could be a room strategy, it could be an a DU strategy. There’s a lot of things that are much less capital intensive to get started if you’re looking to scale.

What I think is really compelling about it, and where I’ve seen people have a ton of success is you might be looking at, a leisure property for short term, and let’s just for kick say it costs half a million dollars. Because it’s a three bedroom and it’s in a, it’s in a Gatlinburg, it’s in a, performant destination.

That half million dollars in midterm might be a quadplex in a suburb or tertiary city, and so you’re gonna end up with four units, and those four units may give you the flexibility to move in and out of long term. Potentially. You might even live in one of ’em and use the other three to house hack your own rent.

You might be able to have one be short term. Two B, midterm one B long-term, and you start to get this flexibility. And the beauty of the scale is they’re literally in the same building. Your maintenance calls, your visits, everything’s right there. And so when you think about just the density of our product, it’s much denser than if you think about Breckenridge and moving around, or especially if you think about, joshua Tree or 30 A or a lot of lake and beach, you’re having to move around so much just to manage it. The scaling problem is logistics, which is how you end up with a property manager. Self-managing midterm, way fewer turnovers and a higher likelihood you can actually put ’em within 10 minutes of where you live.

Makes the scalability, I think, much more attractive because you can build an operating model. You’re doing three to four turnovers a year, and maybe you end up with two quadplexes within 10 miles of your house. That’s appealing. Also because there’s less operational complexity, and we, you’ll hear a lot about this from our top landlords landlord diary girls Katie Lyon and Kelly Bailey.

Katie completely manages her entire portfolio. It’s in Iowa and she lives in Denver because there’s less turnover and because there’s usually tenants there, there’s less surprises. And so you’ve got some different scaling maneuvers, but I think it’s less capital intensive, it’s less operational complexity, and there’s a higher likelihood you can do it close to where you live.

What’s one last thing I’d add? Tim may not always do you a favor in some of your personal business market, is that the management fees and midterm are lower because the turnover’s less. And I know that you guys have a really compelling value product for what you do with short-term management, but short-term management can have a lot of hidden fees depending on who you use.

I frequently find. Often more than 40% of what the traveler actually pays is going to the manager through some combination of fees and what their commission is, et cetera, et cetera. That number in midterms, typically more like 15%, and you don’t have all those fees, and so there’s a little bit less rake if you do decide you don’t want the headache and you wanna scale through using a midterm manager.

And for a lot of people, I’d encourage you. To explore being a midterm manager because there’s really a dearth of them in these major urban and tertiary markets of people who are providing the service right now. It’s still frequently a handful of long-term who figured it out. There’s not a great ecosystem yet.

Great point. There is, there’s opportunity. I just, the whole midterm rental space, so many things about it create a lot of opportunity. One, one of the things that’s also happened with a lot of short-term rental markets is that. Housekeeping fees have gone up a lot for, and so you really gotta factor that in.

If you’re having 3, 4, 5 turnovers a month, but you’re paying $200 a turn or whatever it happens to be it, it really starts to add up. And so I think for those that wanna scale, yeah, just having less turnover because they are longer stays inherently makes it easier. Yeah, of course.

We gotta make sure that you’ve checked all those other boxes, ’cause it’s all easy until you overlook something and you ha you have a, problem like you might with a long term. Yeah. And you, I think that’s true for short term and midterm, but it’s something that, that’s people have to remember you.

A lot of people may call you a host, but you’re running a business, and part of running a business is understanding what the risks are and how you manage ’em. And I don’t think that changes between short term and midterm. I think there’s fewer risks on midterm, but it’s more from what I’ve seen on both sides.

There’s also, there’s probably a little less upside to go with that. Less risk. Yeah. I’m excited about the midterm rental space. I think there’s just so much opportunity for all the. And that you’ve been diving into you mentioned that you guys have a big initiative to get some software parity and make some of these things easier, maybe for those people that have been focused on short term rentals but are now starting to get into midterm rentals.

I you mentioned several times that this kind of feels like short term rentals back in 2010. Where do you see, like the next three years from now, how do you think the midterm rental market’s gonna be looking? Yeah, I think a wooden desk, so I’ll knock on it, but we’ll finish our.

Platform migration and the experience will feel parody to the giants on both sides. And so you’ll be integrated with your property manager. Your content will come in, your messaging will go through your PMS, your availability will be synced everywhere, and we’ll find a middle ground for rates.

We’re not gonna absorb the complexity of 365 days of. Updated multiple times a day, daily pricing. But we’re gonna find some way to make it easier for people to price. And so assume that operationally it gets easier because the technology’s gonna get better. I think that’s table stakes, and we’ve already redone the front end.

Improved search improved. We just launched a new messaging system this week. We’ve launched calendar in the app. We’ve rebuilt the app. A lot of stuff’s happening, but it hasn’t happened enough to where you totally feel it. So I think that’s 0.1, 0.2. In order to solve the housing crisis, we would’ve needed to have been building tens of millions of housing units for the prior five years.

We’re not catching up in the next three years. There is going to be a housing shortage. We’re not going to see interest rates back at, 2%, 2.5%. It’s just no one’s got that in their forecasts. And so I think you can expect a housing shortage and I think you can expect an affordability deficit that, I think what’s changed in my thinking about the next three years is I now really do believe more of what Chesky was saying for a long time at Airbnb about people are going to live different.

We see that in our data. Interestingly, for sure, young people are willing to just live in furnish finders and move around. And it gives ’em professional flexibility. It gives ’em personal flexibility to maybe go be closer to a loved one and not feel tethered. And it also gives ’em financial flexibility to not buy all this furniture.

What I’ve found most interesting is what I call the the grandparent nomads. We see a ton of empty nesters who are booking a two bedroom on our platform for four months to be close to their grandkids. They may not be there all the time because they may be going back and forth from a primary residence, but they wanna have their own space.

And honestly, their kids and grandkids want ’em to have their own space. And I think we’re gonna see more and more of that where as the boomers potentially trade out of housing, that instead of trading into new cheaper housing that they own, they may trade into furnished alternatives that let ’em explore more.

And have some of this wanderlust moment. And so I think within three years that dynamic’s gonna be a lot more pervasive and a lot of the growth is gonna be, really these I’m not gonna say permanent tenant types, but durable tenant types where they’re living this way instead of they’ve got a contract or stipend or project where they need to be in a place and you can count on ’em to come back as repeats in a way that maybe we don’t have as much of today.

Yeah. That’s really exciting to hear that you’re seeing more of those types of stays. I totally agree. Yeah. With interest rates high and people aren’t gonna be buying, if they sell their own today and they buy one for the same amount they’re paying way more, per month.

Trading up in equity, you’re trading down. Which puts more demand on rent, rents and the flexibility of midterm rental, which is great, for the, for people’s primary residences. It’s been interesting for me to think about and I was talking about that with some other industry experts.

Furniture’s a remarkably emotional asset for a lot of people. Not only is it. A deteriorating asset. As soon as you bring it home, it’s worth less, hard to sell, illiquid, et cetera. You can also get pretty tethered to it in a way that like maybe you want to go live in San Diego, but you don’t want to think about what to do with all your stuff.

And I think you may just start to see, some of the generations have less stuff and then have less emotional attachment to. Less capital tied up in furniture. And then that rental model of furniture is a different way to think about how you get asset light and how people have more disposable income.

And also just, more travel. Another great point. I couldn’t help but think, as midterm rentals get more competitive which they will as people chase higher returns, that the listings will also have to get more competitive just as they have on all the other OTAs. And so I wonder what that timeline’s gonna look like.

Like when does the point come where, this, in your property today with the furniture that you’ve had in there for the last 10 years, like starts to eat away at your potential profits? Yeah. I I don’t have a data driven point of view. I have a decade plus experience point of view on short-term rentals and that it will get more competitive.

But I think that. There will be enough demand that it won’t mean something becomes a bad investment or un bookable. It will mean that you’re not getting the rate that you used to or that you’re not getting the rate you think you could because someone else can charge more ’cause they’ve got new stuff, fresher paint, whatever.

It’s not an arms race on amenities. It’s gonna have way more to do with comfort, safety, and really convenience. And so I think it’s gonna be a long time before it’s saturated and I really think rates will start to balance it out. And potentially, the story of Airbnb is, it was cheap rooms and now it’s.

$10 million mansions with services and masseuses and private chefs and Dan, like they went up market. I think that’ll take a lot longer here. But as we go up market, you will see more and more people with higher quality finish outs in a midterm rental. But that’s not gonna change that. Majority of Americans are still making less than a hundred thousand dollars a year and have a budget, and this is what they could work with.

And I think that’s where it’s a little different because you may be willing to stretch or spend more for that spring break, that Christmas vacation that once a year, summer, five day. That’s, you’re actually trying to save money on your three month work trip where you’re on a stipend and take some of that stipend and turn it into your vacation.

So I don’t think there’ll be as much upward pressure from the existing guests. I think it’ll only be if more and more tenant types come in with more disposable income. Awesome. Jeff? Hey I would love to have you back on, this segment, I think there’s just a ton of opportunity as we’ve talked about, and.

It’ll be exciting, to see what, how the next couple of years roll out. And thanks for providing a platform like Furnish Finder. You guys do a great job for anyone out there. Furnish finder.com, that’s basically how they find you and get set up. Absolutely, come check us out, try some content, and really it’s a, it’s $179 a year, whether you’re in the short term rental game or the real estate game.

If you don’t have $179 and your backup fund or marketing funds, like you’ve got some other things to work out in terms of, how are you running this business and what does it look like? And so I’d encourage people to do the research, but then dip your toe in the water if you think it’s a fit.

Excited to see what you guys roll out in the future. Jeff, thanks a bunch for coming on. I know our audience will find a ton of value. Look forward to having you back on in the future. Yeah, very excited to stay in touch and appreciative of the opportunity. Thanks, Tim.