Furnishing Student Rental with IKEA Furniture

[Chris Welch]

It's a prerequisite in my area (Binghamton, NY) to furnish student rentals. I'm competing with two different groups: New apartment buildings with top rents and new commercial furniture and older properties with 40%-50% of the rent and yard sale furniture.

I decided to split the balance and furnish my houses with matching IKEA furniture, at least for the first few years until I can afford the good, indestructible commercial stuff. IKEA stuff shows great when it's new, is all matching which students like, and I can order replacement parts online.

I purchased: Sofas, Coffee Tables, Beds, Desks and Dressers.

Does anyone have experience with this? I'm trying to put together a capital replacement budget and wanted to get a sense for how many years I can get out of the stuff I bought. I'm estimating 4 years to be conservative.

Thanks!

[Chris Welch]

Wanted to provide another update since my last post.

The original set of IKEA furniture is still there. And holding up well by and large - especially the bedroom furniture and the couches.

Out of 12 bedrooms, we've replaced two dressers and a desk in the last two years. We've also had to replace two couch covers. But the tenants have paid for some of this damage and because the cost is so reasonable, from an ROI perspective, it's been a good investment.

The coffee tables don't hold up and basically need to replaced annually, but they are cheap and the tenants pay for them out of their security deposits.

Total annual furniture spend out of my pocket over the last 3 years (minus tenant damage paid from security deposit) has been about $500/yr across 3 apartments. I earn about $7000/yr in added rent to furnish the 12 bedrooms.

The best part is that the tenants love the look of the furniture because it's modern and stylish. As long as I keep up on replacements so the apartments look new, we should be in good shape.

I do anticipate replacing a lot of the furniture again in a couple years.