The Most Difficult Furniture Item (And What To Do About It)

welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast this week we're going to break down the most difficult furniture item for your short-term rental stay tuned welcome to short-term rental riches we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale your portfolio i'm your host tim hubbard so i'm down here in brazil and we finished the renovation on my property that i got earlier this year down here very exciting well i would say we finished

about 95 it's those last few details that always seem to take forever but i'm currently in the process of furnishing it and now while it's very different furnishing a property down here brazil than it is in the u.s we don't have nearly the options at least in this city anyways i'm in a smaller city it's still somewhat complicated to make sure that we get the right sofa or the right couch for our living area and so i would say that the couch is the most difficult

furniture item and also happens to be one of the most expensive so this week we're going to break down some things to consider a few tips and then i'm going to leave you with a few pro tips from one of my favorite interior designers and a reference to her online at the end so let's just jump right in why is this furniture item so difficult well after the bed it's probably the furniture item where people are going to spend the most time actually on it right

so the most wear and tear and unlike a mattress we can't put a cover on this couch right i mean it just wouldn't look right they do sell covers i'm going to talk a little bit about those but mattresses have mattress covers and that makes it really easy to protect against stains and things like that but we can't really do that with a sofa so we got to make sure that we keep that in mind when we get one because one little stain on your beautiful

ten thousand dollar sofa is going to ruin it your guests are going to come in they're going to see the stain immediately they're going to think this place is dirty not just your couch but as soon as someone sees something dirty in your rental they think the whole place is dirty and they start looking around and so we don't want that no one wants to have a stain on our couch so we really have to consider that so i think it's one of the most difficult

because it's one of the most expensive it's where your guests are going to spend the most amount of time most likely after your bed and it's also a large item so in terms of like the logistics and actually putting it in your living area it can make a big difference if you go too big or you go too small or use the wrong color so those are some of the reasons why i think it's the most difficult now let's talk about size the larger the area

i think a little more difficult it's going to be because we might need more than one sofa right we can't have a tiny little sofa fill in a space so of course it's going to be more expensive if we need more furniture if it's a smaller area then we can use a smaller sofa obviously and it's going to cost a little less and there's less configurations really if we have a smaller area but the best way to determine that we have the right size couch for

our space is to use a floor plan we've talked about floor plans a lot before think they're super super valuable not just for furnishing your apartment but also for your guests you can include in your listing description they can see the exact layout so if you're using a floor plan or if you're using a program like room sketcher that's one i use or you can use google sketchup if you're doing it yourself you can plug in the exact dimensions you can do a 3d walkthrough on

these programs so you can feel what it's like in this space before you actually make that big expense and purchase that couch now if you don't want to do that an easy way is just to find a couch that you like or you think might fit and just put some painters tape on the ground and mark it off and make sure that you have enough space between the couch and your walking areas it's not too big so do that if you're not doing the floor plan

but i think the floor plans can really really help i think that they're kind of fun after you start doing them a little bit too so and again if you want the floor plan but you don't want to do it you can use fiverr.com or upwork send some photos and some measurements of your space you can have someone do it for you for a few bucks online so sizing can be a little difficult the staining the material that's on the couch is probably the most important

because like i said if you have a really expensive couch but there's a tiny little stain on it people's imaginations are gonna be flying they're gonna think what the heck were these people doing on this couch before me what is that it's just not good right and if you try to cover it up if you do get a stain on your couch and you put a blanket down and your guest pulls the blanket up well that's not going to be a very pleasant surprise they're going

to see something they don't want to see and again they're going to start thinking about how clean is your place actually so we got to be very cognizant about the materials we choose for our couches materials like leather or even faux leather they're a lot easier to clean right of course leather can be really expensive and you know there's there's a difference if this is our personal living space we might splurge and and get a couch that costs way more because we know that we're going

to be taking care of it but i would urge you to kind of find a middle-of-the-line couch that's not super expensive because if you have lots of guests going through there someone can have an accident and then it's not an easy fix so i think faux leather can work of course there are different qualities to faux leather but it's an easy surface to clean so that one can work well and we're going to talk about a couple places where you can get these couches or a

couple places that i've used and also a couple places where i found they're not very good so another thing you can do in regards to the staining is maybe get a couch that has zip off cushion covers right so if it's not a faux leather or something like that or even if it is if you can take that cushion cover off and wash it or take it to a professional cleaner and that's going to be very helpful it's going to help prolong the life of that

couch and you may be able to buy replacements i think it's a good idea to have replacement covers on hand if you have a material that stains easily because if someone stains it and you have to block your schedule off until you get this little issue fixed it could take a while and a lot of times couches take a long time to order or replacement pieces or covers so if you can get a couch that has a zip off cover and you can wash it or

take it somewhere to be washed and get replacement covers i think that can be an excellent solution let's talk about color so really i'm sitting in this in this white space my apartment's uh pretty empty here still as i'm furnishing stuff but you can see in the background here or if you're listening on the podcast it's pretty much white and that's what i've been using with most all my properties now because white just feels clean but it's also easy to add in color with other furniture

items so you want to be careful when you're adding in color that you don't do it in a huge portion right that you can't something that's not neutral it's not going to blend later so i do suggest getting couches in a neutral color because it's such a big item that way if you decide to change something later on you can change the paint colors you can change other furniture items you still have a couch that's going to work in that space you can always throw decorative

colored pillows over the top and throw blankets and stuff like that but i think it's best to go with a somewhat neutral color with your couch because it's such a big item so where do we find these couches well it depends where we are if we're in the us we have tons and tons of options online so talk about the big ones first amazon wayfarer i've tried a lot of these couches and just like any big company i mean they have better options and they have

some that are not good i will say we've got a lot of couches from amazon that just didn't hold up they were not what we were expecting and so i think the best thing to do if you happen to be in your market where your rental is check one out person you can sit on it you can you can feel the texture you can see how it looks then you don't have that that risk of getting something that you didn't expect and then trying to ship

a couch back isn't necessarily easy so i would say that's the best approach now if you're working with an interior designer well then you can put your trust in them and they will know where to find a good couch a good sofa a good love seat any of these large furniture items in the living room so that's a good option but if you are ordering online um you know we've got some couches off sofa mania lately and of course we can we can check the reviews

so if there's a ton of reviews and it says it shows you know people it met people's expectations has great reviews and you have the measurements online so make sure you double check those and check the height actually when we're while we're on the subject height can be really impactful too if you have a low ceiling area for example and you put a high couch in there it's going to make the space look smaller so i'm going to share with you one of my favorite interior

designers on youtube in the end and actually give you a few of her just top tips because she's a pro i'm not a pro but i have furnished dozens and dozens of my own properties with the help of my team and we've experimented with all kinds of couches and we've had a lot of bad ones and we've done it wrong a lot so hopefully some of these tips will save you from that one other note on couches is that as a short-term rental host we're trying

to accommodate as many people as we can times because the more people we accommodate the more more money we can make right often times and so i used to squash in these sofa couches in a lot of my apartments and first of all i it wasn't a big enough space a lot of these apartments to add the extra sleeping space in there there's not as many good sofa bed options the ones that fold out a lot of times are really heavy maybe they're not put together

well and so if you're trying to get a sofa bed to accommodate more people just keep that in mind you're probably going to have a fewer options and you also have that additional housekeeping operational piece right if you get a reservation and they want to use a sofa bed well then you got to make sure you communicate that with your housekeepers make sure it's made up you have the extra linens there or that they're there on hand so that adds one other little operational piece if

you only have one property or a couple properties it's not a big deal but if you start doing that with dozens of properties it can be another piece that you gotta consider so a little note on sofa beds so we can buy from really nice places online too you know i mean couches are one of those furniture items where you could spend five hundred dollars and you can spend twenty thousand dollars i mean it's really really a big range but you want to get something that's

going to hold up so i personally i like ikea i think they have a lot of good furniture but they also have a lot of not good furniture and you can see that in the prices they have not i wouldn't say expensive couches at ikea but they have some that definitely are on the higher end and those couches can hold up really well they have couches with real leather and materials that are easier to clean so consider spending a little more to get something that's going

to hold up because if you have to replace a couch it's not an easy item your schedule is going to be blocked and if you're charging 150 a night and you block your calendar for five nights to try to find a new couch well there's potentially 750 dollars and it's likely going to take you much longer than five days to get new couching so get a good one from the beginning but you don't need to go extreme make sure you consider the size consider the color

i think neutral will be best and consider the fabric leather or faux leather can be really good or a couch that sells replaceable covers or you can take the cushion covers off and wash them so those are a few suggestions around couches now i want to talk about one of my favorite interior designers on youtube that i follow at the moment you know these things are always changing but but she is really good and she's she's a pro her name is lisa holt and she has

her own channel lisa holt design she's got tons of videos on there i want to give you just a few tips i pulled out one of her recent videos on this subject of couches first of all don't push the couches all the way up against the wall it'll make things look smaller that's just just how it is i know this is like our natural instinct to just push everything against the wall but really we want to pull it away from the wall a little bit you

can see some examples on her channel or if you google images of living areas one that has couches against the wall one that doesn't you'll see you'll see what i'm talking about it doesn't seem intuitive at first but it really is pull it away from the wall it's gonna seem a little bigger consider using sectional sofas if you have a really big space those can be you know you can move them and put them in different combinations if you decide to change something later on so

that could be an option if you have a really big space don't put too much seating in your living area so if you have a really big space don't cram it in with you know you want to leave her suggestion lisa hold suggestion 30 to 36 inches of space for your main walking points so if you have to walk through the living area to get to a bedroom or whatever it is around a coffee table you want to have like 30 to 36 inches of space

so keep that in mind when you're shopping for your couch and doing your floor plan or putting your tape on the on the ground to get your measurements right and then lastly she talks about height that it really does matter and not everything has to be the exact same height like it's nice to have variation in heights it's nice to have variation in tones and colors and all these things add to our interior design on a whole and make our space better because it really is

the space that we're living in changes everything it's going to change the way our guests feel and if we make them feel better with a really well-designed space then we're going to get better reviews so hopefully some of those suggestions help you if you're in the process of searching for a couch or you're looking for a new one or if you're about to start your first rental of course all this is easier if we have better guests coming in that take better care of our property

so if you haven't yet we have all of our house rules in the show notes or if you're watching the youtube channel you can click on the link in the show notes there and get our our house rules the ones i use with all my properties those are going to help you get a little better guess but until next time if you're out there shopping around consider these tips check out lisa holt's channel she's got some really good info and there's a lot of other good

ones on there until next time i hope you guys all have a wonderful wonderful week cheers you