Airbnb Grew 52%. This Rental Strategy Grew 136% — and Almost Nobody's Talking About It

Airbnb Grew 52%. This Rental Strategy Grew 136% — and Almost Nobody's Talking About It

Somewhere between the 12-month lease and the nightly Airbnb booking sits a rental category most investors still can't name. It doesn't show up in short-term rental regulation fights. It doesn't need a Superhost badge or a cleaning crew on standby. And according to new data, it just grew more than twice as fast as short-term rentals while everyone was busy watching Airbnb get regulated out of major cities.

The category is the mid-term rental (MTR): a fully furnished unit leased for 30 to 89 days to travel nurses, relocating families, corporate contractors, insurance-displaced homeowners, and academics on temporary assignment. It isn't a new idea. What's new is the scale — and the fact that most investors are still building their entire strategy around the other two options.

If you're holding a property that underperforms as a 12-month lease and feels like too much hassle as a nightly rental, this is the data that should change your next move.

The 30-to-89-Day Window Nobody's Optimizing For

A joint report from Furnished Finder and AirDNA — the first study of its kind on this segment — found that U.S. bookings of 28 nights or longer grew 136% between 2019 and 2025, climbing from roughly 20 million nights to 46 million. Short-term rentals grew 52% over the same stretch. Mid-term rentals aren't just growing — they're growing 2.6 times faster than the category everyone's obsessed with.

The reason is structural, not seasonal. MTR tenants aren't tourists. They're professionals with a defined, temporary reason to be in a specific place: a hospital contract, a corporate relocation, a home rebuild after a claim. That means demand doesn't evaporate when a city passes a short-term rental ordinance, and it doesn't compete for the same inventory as long-term renters hunting for a permanent address.

It also solves the two biggest complaints investors have about the other two models. Long-term leases lock you into 2024-era rent for 12 months while your market moves. Short-term rentals generate higher nightly rates but bury you in turnover costs, guest turnover, and dynamic-pricing whiplash. Furnished Finder's data shows MTR structurally cuts turnover costs by up to 70% compared to short-term operations, because a tenant staying 60 or 90 days means you're cleaning and re-listing a handful of times a year instead of after every three-night stay.

Add in a wave of short-term rental crackdowns rolling through major metros this year, and mid-term becomes the rental structure most likely to stay out of the next city council meeting entirely — because most local STR ordinances define "short-term" as anything under 30 days. Cross that line and you're often operating under standard landlord-tenant law, not the hospitality-permit regime hitting Airbnb hosts.

The Numbers

The growth isn't a blip — it's compounding. Year-over-year, mid-term rentals grew 8% in the latest period tracked, versus 3% for short-term rentals. Monthly rentals now represent 19% of all U.S. rental demand, and on Furnished Finder specifically, listings have grown from roughly 20,000 units before the pandemic to more than 300,000 today, with booking inquiries tripling and unique travelers more than doubling since 2022.

The clearest local case study is New York City, where ShortTermRentalz reports mid-term rentals' share of total rental demand jumped from about 33% in 2022 to roughly 70% by 2024 — a near-total flip in just two years, driven largely by the city's aggressive short-term rental restrictions pushing hosts toward the 30-day-plus structure almost by default. Urban markets overall posted a compound annual growth rate near 16% from 2023 through late 2025.

Who's actually renting these units matters for how you furnish and market a property. Furnished Finder's tenant breakdown: business travelers make up 30% of demand, healthcare professionals 25%, relocating families and insurance placements 20%, academics 10%, and digital nomads 5%. That's a healthcare- and corporate-heavy tenant base — not a vacation crowd — which is why proximity to hospitals, universities, and employment corridors matters more than proximity to a beach or a downtown entertainment district.

On the unit side, 55% of renters search for properties at $2,500 a month or less, and 85% of Furnished Finder page views go to units with two bedrooms or fewer. You don't need a five-bedroom luxury build to compete here — you need a clean, well-located, unfussy two-bedroom that a traveling professional can move into for a season.

"Monthly rentals are not a temporary trend, but a structural shift in housing," Furnished Finder CEO Jeff Hurst said of the data. Separately, AvenueWest's 2026 ROI analysis puts the average corporate-housing tenant stay at 99 days — long enough to substantially cut your annual turnover count, short enough that you're still repricing multiple times a year instead of locking in a stale 12-month rate.

Common Mistakes Investors Make Here

• Furnishing it like an Airbnb. Trendy, photogenic decor is built for a 3-night stay and a five-star review. A travel nurse living in your unit for 60 days wants durable furniture, a functional kitchen, and blackout curtains for someone working night shifts — not a curated aesthetic.
• Pricing off short-term or long-term comps instead of MTR comps. Pull comps from an Airbnb nightly-rate tool or a standard unfurnished-lease listing and you'll misprice the unit in either direction. Mid-term rentals have their own comp set, and most investors have never pulled it.
• Chasing tourist markets instead of demand-driver markets. The tenant data is clear: this is a healthcare-and-corporate-relocation trade, not a vacation trade. A property three miles from a regional hospital system will outperform a property near a tourist strip for this specific model.
• Skipping the lease structure entirely. A mid-term rental isn't a month-to-month standard lease and isn't a short-term rental agreement — it needs its own furnished-housing lease template with clear terms on utilities, furnishings, and early-termination clauses (especially for travel-nurse "contract cancellation" scenarios).

How to Use PropGPT for This

"Pull every 2-bedroom-or-smaller property within 3 miles of [hospital or university name] in [city] that's been on market 45+ days, and rank by estimated cash flow as a furnished mid-term rental versus a standard 12-month lease." This surfaces underpriced, sitting inventory near the exact demand drivers — hospitals, universities, corporate campuses — that generate MTR tenants.

"Model three cash-flow scenarios for [address]: a 12-month unfurnished lease at market rent, a furnished mid-term rental at 30-89 day stays, and a short-term nightly rental — including the furnishing cost and its payback period in months." This turns the "which strategy wins" question into a number instead of a guess, and tells you how fast furnishing spend pays for itself.

"Find the top 5 zip codes in [state or region] ranked by density of hospitals, universities, and major employers, cross-referenced against current for-sale and rental inventory and days-on-market." This is how you find your next MTR market instead of guessing based on where you already own property.

"Pull comparable furnished monthly-rental listings for [address], not standard unfurnished long-term comps — and flag if my planned rent is priced off the wrong comp set." Mid-term rentals get systematically mispriced when investors default to whatever comp tool they already use for long-term leases.

"Build a due-diligence checklist for underwriting [address] as a mid-term rental, including local short-term-rental ordinance thresholds, HOA restrictions on stays under 90 days, and insurance requirements." Every city defines "short-term" differently — this keeps you from accidentally structuring a deal that trips a permit requirement you didn't know existed.

The Bottom Line

The market already made its decision: mid-term rentals are growing 2.6 times faster than short-term rentals, dodging most of the regulatory pressure hammering Airbnb hosts, and drawing a tenant base — healthcare workers, relocating professionals, corporate contractors — that isn't going anywhere. Most investors still don't have this strategy in their toolkit, which means the properties near your local hospital or corporate park are still being evaluated as ordinary long-term rentals instead of what the data says they could be.

You don't need to buy anything new to test this. Pull your worst-performing rental, run it through the three-scenario cash-flow comparison above, and see what a furnished 60-day lease actually does to your numbers before you sign another 12-month tenant.

This is market analysis and reporting, not financial or legal advice — verify local short-term/mid-term rental ordinances and HOA rules before converting a property.