How To Rent Your Property to Travel Nurses

Property owners often contact us to ask how they can rent their properties to travel nurses. While we are not a property listing service, we do have expertise in the travel healthcare industry. So, in this article, we’ll discuss everything property owners need to know to rent their properties to travel nurses.

Who Rents Travel Nurse Housing?

First, it’s important to know who actually rents travel nurse housing. Sometimes, the agency rents the housing. Other times, the travel nurse rents the property.

Typically, this choice is left to the travel nurse. They can choose to have the company secure their housing or they can choose to secure it on their own. If they secure it on their own, the travel nursing company gives them a lodging reimbursement.

How Much Do Companies and Nurses have to Spend on Travel Nurse Housing?

The amount of money that travel nurses receive for housing varies by location. It also varies from contract to contract.

For example, it’s fair to say that travel nurses will have more to spend on housing in San Francisco, CA than they do in Des Moines, IA. Additionally, the amount they have to spend will vary within a given area based on how much the particular contract pays.

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Perhaps most importantly, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the travel nursing industry operates on a tight budget when it comes to housing. For example, corporate housing is typically far too expensive for the travel healthcare industry.

How to Make Your Property an Attractive Option for Travel Nurses

There are a number of ways you can make your property an attractive option for travel nurses. Basically, it’s important to understand the unique housing challenges travel nurses face. The more you can address these challenges, the more likely travel nurses will be to rent your property.

Length of Stay

Travel nursing contracts typically last 13 weeks. Contracts can be both longer or shorter than 13 weeks. However, only a small percentage are over 13 weeks. Therefore, if you must lease your property for longer than that, then travel nursing is not the right market for you.

Contract Cancellations

Additionally, hospitals can cancel travel nursing contracts for any number of reasons. Moreover, travel nurses are away from home so they may come across any number of reasons to cancel a contract early. This is simply the nature of remote contract work.

While less than 10% of contracts end early, that’s still enough for travel nurses and companies to be concerned. Therefore, travel nurses and companies typically look for month-to-month housing options.

Furnishings

It’s very difficult for travel nurses to manage unfurnished properties. They rarely, if ever, travel with furniture in tow. Instead, they might work with furniture rental companies which can be very expensive. Or, they might furnish a place on the cheap via Craigslist which can be time consuming. Therefore, it’s best for property owners to furnish their properties if they want to rent to travel nurses.

Utilities, Cable and WIFI

As you might imagine, it’s a pain to establish utilities, cable and WIFI every three months, or even every 6 months. As a result, travel nurses strongly prefer properties that provide utilities, cable and WIFI.

Price

As mentioned above, travel nurses have a modest budget for housing. What does that mean exactly?

First, the base rental price should be inline with normal market values for rent in the area. Specifically, travel nurses typically avoid properties that charge high premium prices for short term stays.

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Second, you can certainly factor in the cost of furniture, utilities, cable and WIFI. Travel nurses expect to pay extra for those services.

What do Travel Nurses Look for in Rental Properties?

To recap, you will greatly increase your chances of renting your property to travel nurses if you can do the following:

1. Provide lease terms of 3 months or less
2. Month-to-month lease terms are highly desirable
3. Furnish your property
4. Provide utilities, cable and WIFI. Roll the cost into the price.
5. Price your property inline with normal market values.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Renting Your Property to Travel Nurses

Next, it’s important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of renting your property to travel nurses. Here are some of the advantages:

1. Travel nurse pay is typically well above the median pay for any given area.
2. They’re great if you’re specifically interested in short-term tenants who stay longer than several days or a week, but shorter than 6 months or a year.
3. They have steady, stable employment for the most part.
4. They’re great if you have a furnished property that you prefer to keep furnished.

Here are some of the disadvantages:

1. Risk of contract cancellation means you may have slightly higher turnover than you expect.
2. You can’t always count on a travel nurse to be available to rent your property because there simply aren’t that many travel healthcare professionals.
3. You might have to clean and prep your property more often as the turnover will be higher than the turnover for standard lease terms.

Finally, it’s also important to remember that “guests” become “tenants” once they stay in your property for a specified amount of time. Tenants have more rights than guests. For example, it’s more difficult to evict tenants.

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These time-frames vary by jurisdiction. For example, guests become tenants if they stay in your property for more than 28 days in many jurisdictions. You might view this as an advantage or disadvantage depending on your circumstances.

Where Should You List Your Property for Travel Nurses?

There are several places you can list your property for travel nurses and other travel healthcare professionals. We’ll take a look at each option in this section.

Travel Nurse Housing Websites and Marketplaces

There are a couple of websites that are dedicated specifically to housing for travel healthcare professionals. Those websites are:

• Furnished Finder and its subsidiary TravelNurseHosuing.com
• Transplant Housing

These websites are fairly similar. Property owners pay a fee to list their properties. The fees are roughly the same for each service. There are no additional costs for property owners or guests.

The services provide various tools for communication between property owners and tenants. However, the actual lease agreement is handled off-platform between the owner and tenant.

How to Use Airbnb and VRBO to Rent Your Property to Travel Nurses

Many travel nurses and travel nursing companies use general housing marketplaces like Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO, FlipKey and others to find their housing. These services are a bit more difficult to work with because the cancellation policies and payments are handled through the service itself.

Therefore, you are subject to the policies and fees associated with the particular service. Moreover, the fees and policies vary between services.

You might be leery of using these services because you don’t want to rent your property for very short terms like nightly or weekly. Perhaps that is why you want to rent to travel nurses in the first place.

The good news is that you can prevent shorter stays on these platforms by setting a longer minimum stay. This will also make it so your property shows higher in the search results when people search for longer term stays, which is exactly what travel nurses do.

How To List Your Property With Travel Nursing Companies

We routinely receive inquiries from property owners who want to list their property directly with travel nursing companies.  This is certainly possible. However, several factors inhibit the usefulness of this approach

First, as we mentioned above, sometimes the travel nurse secures the housing. Therefore, the agency is not involved in all cases.

Second, hospitals almost always work with multiple agencies to meet their travel nursing needs. Even when the hospital has an exclusive contract with one company, the one company will work with many agencies to help them get the needs filled.

In many cases, hospitals work with 50 to 100 agencies or more. Meanwhile, each hospital has a relatively small number of travel nurses.

Moreover, the housing operations at most travel nursing companies are not as organized as you might think. Therefore, there is a good chance that the agency files your housing option such that it will never be seen again.

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Finally, many travel nursing companies simply will not work with independent property owners. These companies work only with large apartment complexes or established property management firms.

All of that said, you can try to list your property directly with agencies if you would like. You can start by contacting the largest companies in the industry. These companies account for over 50% of the travel nursing placements.

In addition, you can try contacting the staffing offices of the hospitals in your area and asking them which travel nursing agencies they work with the most. If the hospital has an exclusive contract, then they may not be able to help you identify the other agencies that staff a lot of nurses with them.

How To Rent Your Property To Travel Nurses On Facebook

Facebook is very popular with travel nurses. In fact, there are many Facebook groups devoted to travel nurse housing. As a property owner, group admins will most certainly accept your request to join.

You can post your housing to the group using the standard posting features. You can also post your housing in the “Files” section of the group. This section allows you to upload a document, like a Word Document or PDF, with information about your property.

One of the advantages of Facebook housing groups is that they get a fair amount of traffic. Another advantage is that they are free.

There are also disadvantages. First, your listing will get pushed out of site quickly as other users post after you. This happens in both the Discussion and Files sections.

Second, Facebook’s search feature is atrocious. It will only return results back to a certain date. Moreover, it doesn’t always return all the relevant results. Let’s face it, Facebook’s primary goal is to keep users on the site, not to serve up answers quickly and conveniently.

Here is a list of Facebook Groups dedicated to travel nurse housing:

1. Travel Nursing: Places/Rooms For Rent
2. Traveling Nurse Housing
3. Travel Nurse Housing USA – Private & Shared Rooms, Apartments, Sublets
4. Travel Nurse Housing – The Gypsy Nurse
5. Travel Nurse Housing – Furnished Finder
6. Gypsy Soul Travel Nurse Housing Options
7. Nomadic Nursing – A Travel Nurse Housing Page
8. Travel Nurse Housing Rentals by Landlords
9. Travel Nurse Rooms for Rent
10. Housing the country, one hospital at a time!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many options to help you rent your property to travel nurses. None of them are 100% foolproof. In other words, each option could return prospective renters who aren’t actually travel nurses.

Of course, the niche services Furnished Finder and Transplant Housing are your best bets. However, they do entail an upfront cost. That said, it might be well worth the cost to save you from the hassle you might find on other services.