Furnished Finder 2026

Alex Reeves: Hi everybody, welcome to Invest Smart with Steadily. I'm Alex Reeves, lead brand marketer here at Steadily, and today I'm really excited to welcome my friend Katie Lyon from Furnished Finder. Welcome, Katie.

Steadily and Furnished Finder are partners, and there have been so many new things and new features that Furnished Finder has come out with the last month or two. As I'm an investor myself, I'm on Furnished Finder. I love it. Love the platform. I've gotten a lot of really good inquiries and leads for my midterm rental from it. I'm really excited to catch up and learn more about what you guys are building at Furnished Finder and what's going on. Let's dive in.

I keep seeing emails about lots of new updates recently. Give me an overview. If you haven't been on the platform in a while, or you're a real estate investor and there are new features, what are those? How can they be used? What are you excited about?

Katie Lyon: There are so many new features that we have to pick and choose which wins we share so we don't completely overwhelm people. There is so much, and a lot of it is behind the scenes with massive tech upgrades, rewriting software, and our engineers doing very engineery things that I don't understand, but I really appreciate the outcome of them.

Things like our messaging system are getting a complete overhaul. How your property shows up in the search. How your property is displayed. We call it your property details page, but it's your listing page. Your calendar, how you can edit your calendar, especially on mobile and within the app. Travelers can now put in a moveout date, which they couldn't before. Seems pretty obvious, but it's really helpful for travelers.

Our stats page is undergoing more than a facelift. It's getting a full body transformation. When that sucker hits live, all of the investors are going to have their socks knocked off, because it's going to be more data and a much more digestible format that you can make decisions for your business with. That's going to be coming out really soon. Super excited about that.

Alex: Of all of these changes, which all sound really exciting, what kind of feedback have you heard from real estate investors that people have been begging for or asking for that you guys have just recently rolled out? What are you most excited about?

Katie: It's kind of a mix of everything. For so long, real estate investors knew that Furnished Finder was the quirky tool that worked. Now we're getting to the point where we can let go of that quirky word a little bit slowly, and people are like, "Oh no, it just works." It's a platform that helps me find those tenants, and you know you're not going to have to work against it. We're not done. We still have a lot of work to do.

I'll get ahead of myself a little bit and say when that stats page hits, which will be very soon, that is by far going to be my favorite upgrade we have done in a while. The one that is out already that I'm really excited about is the listing performance panel. Investors that have discovered it and learned how to use it love it, but a lot of investors are not fully utilizing it yet, and hopefully they will be.

When you log into your dashboard, it gives you data on your individual listing. As investors, we just want data. When you give us data on your listing, it's that next level that can be really insightful. You can watch how many impressions your listing has gotten one week and compare it to what you get the following week. You can start paying attention to some of the trends and then make changes, like updating your pricing. You can see how those numbers begin to move. It's almost like a Google Analytics for your property listing. It's really insightful.

Alex: That's amazing. I think that's something you guys would even have an edge over Airbnb on. On Airbnb you really can't see this directionally. You can see how you're comparing, but I don't think it's super specific. Somebody like myself, I want to see is my listing growing, week over week, am I doing something, do I need to change something? That sounds like a feature that will actually be better for the marketplace.

Katie: Yeah. Airbnb shows the data more in comparison to other listings, which is much more helpful with a short-term, but with a long-term, it's how are you moving the needle on your own? What were your impressions last week when you logged on Friday and you jotted down the number? When you log on this Friday, is the number different? You're not out there to get 15 bookings a month. You want four a year. You're in a race against yourself, not against everybody else, especially since the traveler types have such different needs. As an owner, you're constantly maybe tweaking the language or the photos to speak to a specific traveler. If you see an uptick week to week, you can know, oh, people want to see more of that. I think that's the insight that people should be excited about.

Alex: I sort of know the answer because I've seen Jeff Hurst, Furnished Finder CEO, talk at different conferences, but what are some of the trends as far as the midterm avatar or audience you guys are seeing? Who's coming on Furnished Finder more right now and who's looking for midterm rentals?

Katie: Jeff speaks about everything much more eloquently and with a much larger brain than I do, just because he is Jeff Hurst. But the demand is really high. It's really, really high.

The trends we're seeing are a lot of corporate travelers. When people think corporate travelers, they only think guy going to the airport in a suit going to work on a project for six weeks and then coming home. That's part of it, but it's also welders, electricians, general contractors, project managers who are going to build new data centers, or people who are helping to build new roads. The data centers thing is huge. It's huge.

Overall there's a lot more investment in infrastructure and development of these types of businesses where they have to bring in skilled trades for a certain amount of time. They don't need them for a week. They need them for six weeks or six months. They're specialty trade workers, or maybe they're a project manager that's done this thing three times. Instead of hiring someone new, they're going to help that guy get out to Cincinnati for six weeks. It's not a new way of corporate travel. It's just really exploded.

Alex: With that, data centers is what's interesting. I was actually in a Facebook group with other midterm rental owners today. Somebody was talking about Abilene, Texas, which is in the middle of nowhere, but they were saying they cannot get enough houses there for the amount of demand. They have several units there and they're constantly filled with midterm stays.

I'm curious, what are some geographic markets that are seeing a lot of growth on the platform?

Katie: We're seeing a lot of growth because of those spikes with things like data centers and business travelers. Relocation is also a really quickly growing tenant type. People who are moving even in the same market, or to a different market, and are looking for a furnished stay in between markets, we're seeing outsized demand there.

Some of these newer places like Scottsdale: Scottsdale has always been high for the short-term market, but for the midterm market or longer stays, we're seeing that's the new Phoenix. Then once you move into the midsize markets, places like Fort Lauderdale and Mesa, Arizona. I might be a little naive. I could not tell you where Mesa, Arizona is, but a lot of travelers do.

Rochester, New York: Rochester is one of those where you're like, "What is going on in Rochester?" Well, something is going on in Rochester, New York. Then you've got places like Mountain View, California, Redwood City, California, and Abilene, Texas for small. Good old Abilene. Could I tell you where it is on a map? No, I could not, but a lot of travelers can.

Alex: Thank you for sharing that. This is sort of insurance related, but I'm curious, Steadily does the property insurance, the liability that goes with a property, and then loss of rental income, which is what typically is the package that comes with an insurance policy. But tenant quality and vetting is something that we don't do, and it really does lead into a lot of that liability. It really does impact our business. We are covering the owner for the liability that somebody staying in your house may cause to the property. Talk to me about how Furnished Finder helps hosts. Whether it's new things you're doing or existing tools, how do you guys reduce risk and help with some of that screening structure?

Katie: We offer a tenant screening product in partnership with TransUnion, and I would encourage every single person to screen every single tenant over the age of 18.

I like to think that the protection starts with Steadily. Then it goes through a tenant screening, and then your lease is also a part of that. You have things like a deposit that also help with your protection from all these different angles. For me, Steadily is going to cover my overarching liability, my loss of income, and my physical property. The tenant screening is protecting me from hopefully having to deal with anything. It's going to protect me from not knowing what I might not know. It just protects my business. It's the operations. I know I'm protected even if I have a bad tenant, but I really don't want a bad tenant.

It's not typical to get a bad tenant when you're in midterms, and I say bad tenant very loosely. What defines a bad tenant? Everybody has their different definition. But the people who are traveling for midterms, they're people who need to travel. They're not the people who want to travel. Typically they have somewhere they're trying to go to next, whether it's their next work contract, they're ready for their next home, or they're ready to get back home. They're not the type of people who want to turn into squatters. They're not the type of people who want to damage your property or who would be inclined to damage your property a lot. But you still have to check your boxes. You still need to do your due diligence.

I also like that with tenant screening, you as a landlord can cover the cost. It's about $45, but it's typically paid by the traveler. I like that because that means when I'm going through the inquiry process with a traveler, they take it seriously enough to pay for that. They've got a little bit of skin in the game. They're serious about it.

Alex: For so many investors, especially if you've got a regular W2 and you're doing this as a secondary source of income, it's going to protect your time. Nobody wants to be pulled away from their job and their business to deal with a tenant who wrecked a property.

Katie: It honestly makes you want to quit the whole industry. Totally. And it only takes one. I had a tenant once who was honestly quite a nightmare. They were very much not the typical midterm tenant, and there were red flags on their screening, but I was like, "I really want to get someone in this property." I went with it, and I learned the hard way that no tenant is better than the wrong tenant.

It wasn't that I was worried about my overall coverage, because I have the landlord coverage. It was more like, I'm so sick of dealing with this guy. I'm so sick of dealing with this. It's your time. It's who you're starting a relationship with. It's a tenant-landlord relationship.

Alex: With that relocation trend, are you guys seeing a lot of baby boomers thinking about retirement or trying to downsize from their original house and maybe trying out some different beach markets or vacation markets for a midterm stay or a longer-term stay?

Katie: It's interesting. I think we're seeing a lot of different things happen with that generation. One thing we're seeing is they are retaining their homes longer than we've seen with any generation previous. I know my grandma, who's in her mid-80s and widowed, is still in her house and has no intentions of leaving. That's where she's lived for 50 years. Their roots are very deep.

But we also know that on the financial and logistical side, they might need to rent out a room. They might need to rent out a basement. They also might want to, because they might be a little lonely, or they might want a little bit of help around the house, or they might want to help the next generation get started. That's something that's going to be really interesting as we enter the next few years.

There are also boomers who are exploring different options of what would it look like if I spent the summer by my grandkids, or what would it look like if I spent my winters in Florida and stayed up here in my main house in Minnesota. It's interesting. I don't think they're following the same path that generations before them had, and it'll be interesting to see how that continues to emerge.

Alex: That's such a good answer. Thank you so much, Katie, for joining us today. If people want to learn more about Furnished Finder, where should they go?

Katie: You can always go to furnishedfinder.com. We also have a podcast, Landlord Diaries. We have about 150 episodes and we've got tons of information there. We've got a blog. We've got a resources page. This has been great. I love anytime we get to spend together and just talk real estate and learn about where things are going and what we're seeing.

Alex: Awesome. Thank you so much, Katie. Bye, everybody.

Katie: Thank you.