Rental Beside Hospital Creative Rental Situations

[Mark Watkins]

I wanted to see if anybody had ever developed a relationship with or had a contract with a hospital to provide short-term housing for doctors or other staff. I have a SFH rental coming online in April that is right beside of a teaching hospital. I have talked to several doctors who have traveled to this hospital from nearby cities for rotations and complain about having to travel back-and-forth every day. Even though it's an hour commute round trip, after a full day they just want to crash. Plan A is to just rent this house as a residence with a 12 month lease as I usually would. However, I like to be creative I had the idea of approaching the hospital to see if there was a need to provide such housing to doctors or other staff. Has anyone done this? What advice or warnings would you give? Any thoughts or feedback are welcome.

[Ariel Smith]

@Mark Watkins I have experience with this at my previous company. Most traveling medical professionals are working for one of the big companies such as Medical Solutions, Aya Healthcare, or one of their subsidiaries. They receive stipends for housing which they negotiate with their contracts. It is then their responsibility to find housing on their own, which provides a huge opportunity to market to this group.

Universities and medical centers work differently in that they usually coordinate housing for the rotating staff. In my area, Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford has a network of property owners they actually refer business to. So I'm not sure which category the hospital you are near falls under, but I'd reach out to the hospital directly to find out. Call and ask for the HR department or whichever person places the traveling professionals. If they tell you they place the travelers, great! Ask how you can be added to their network. If not, then sometimes the best bet is to use sites like VRBO/HomeAway and Airbnb to attract these corporate guests. 

Either way, there is most definitely a market to house these people and they are great tenants!