Eric McConnell
4 min read
In This Article:
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Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB) gave birth to a cottage industry of short-term rentals worldwide, and astute real estate investors dove in with both hands. High profits motivated property owners to become short-term rental specialists. Many local governments responded with short-term rental bans, but landlords have devised a new workaround: the mid-term lease. These goldilocks leases are now generating better returns than short-term rentals while simultaneously complying with local regulations.
This trend, which is a winner for real estate investors, but still has the potential to leave traditional renters out in the cold, was recently profiled in Business Insider. Property owner Zeona McIntyre discovered the potential of mid-term leases during the COVID pandemic. When the pandemic set in, the chaos caused by stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions led to her losing nearly all her Airbnb bookings.
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“I was really open to doing whatever I needed to get my properties rented,” she told Business Insider. McIntyre found success on a website called Furnish Finder. The platform focused on offering leases longer than 30 days but less than one year to working professionals. It turned out to be the happy medium between Airbnb and being a traditional long-term landlord.
“I realized there are tons of people looking all the time for longer stays, and longer stays are kind of awesome because people don’t need as much from you. They’re OK to go buy their own toilet paper and change the batteries because they’re living there,” she said. It was a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention, and the mid-term rental business was so good to McIntyre that she converted all of her income properties to the new format.
“My bread-and-butter is these mid-term rentals,” said McIntyre. “I want a longer tenant in there, and I don’t want to have to think about it for three months.” Business Insider says she is not alone in discovering the potential advantages of mid-term rentals. Other landlords are beginning to realize that taking this middle-of-the-road approach offers a host of potential advantages.
