How the furnished apartment industry works
There is a whole industry between hotels and unfurnished leases, built for people mid-move: a new job, a travel contract, a renovation, a season somewhere else. This page explains it in five minutes.
Why the category exists
Hotels price by the night and get painful past a week. Unfurnished apartments want a 12-month lease, a truck full of furniture, and utility accounts in your name. For a stay of two nights to six months, neither fits. Professionally managed furnished apartments fill that gap: real apartments in residential buildings, furnished and stocked, with utilities and WiFi handled, bookable online for exactly the stretch you need.
The companies behind them are not listing sites. Each one controls its own inventory and runs it to one standard, which is what separates this category from vacation-rental marketplaces where every listing is one host’s furniture and effort. Quality comes standard; the real differences are price, location, and terms. That is what this site compares.
Same category, five different playbooks
Every operator has to solve the same problem: how do you get thousands of apartments without buying buildings? Their answers differ, and the differences show up in prices, deposits, and where their inventory sits.
Landing
How it gets supply: Partners with apartment owners and property managers instead of leasing buildings. Landing signs a services agreement rather than a lease, pays for all the furnishing itself, and shares the revenue with the building owner, who can take units back after a short ramp period. That model lets it spread across hundreds of cities quickly.
Scale: 10,000+ units signed across 250+ cities, per its own partner page (read Aug 2026); press coverage in 2025 reported 7,000+ live apartments.
Stays: Furnished apartments with roughly month-or-longer flexible stays; you can extend indefinitely and leave with two weeks’ notice.
Blueground
How it gets supply: The classic lease-arbitrage operator: it signs 1-to-2-year leases directly with landlords, furnishes the apartments to its own standard, and re-rents them for 30-plus-day stays. It is also adding asset-light routes, including a partner network and franchising.
Scale: 15,000 apartments in 32 cities worldwide, per press coverage of its Japan franchise launch (Jan 2024); its own site currently says “tens of thousands” without an exact count.
Stays: Designer-furnished apartments for stays of 30 days or longer, aimed at relocating professionals and corporate clients.
Kasa
How it gets supply: An asset-light operator that signs management agreements with the owners of apartment buildings and boutique hotels rather than leasing the units itself. The owner keeps the real estate; Kasa runs the guest experience with a tech-heavy, virtual-front-desk model.
Scale: 75+ properties from 40+ property partners and over a million room nights, per its own about page (read Aug 2026); it absorbed competitor Mint House in early 2026.
Stays: Hotel-style flexibility: book a night, a week, or months, with no minimum-stay emphasis.
Placemakr
How it gets supply: Runs entire buildings as “flexible-use real estate” in partnership with multifamily owners and developers: some buildings fully furnished and bookable, some split between furnished stays and conventional leases, and pop-up hotels inside brand-new buildings while they lease up.
Scale: 13+ active properties across 10+ US markets and over $1B in real estate assets under management, per its own partner page and blog (read Aug 2026). Total unit count not published.
Stays: “Apartment meets hotel”: nightly stays through multi-month extended stays in the same buildings.
Sentral
How it gets supply: Manages large urban apartment communities on behalf of institutional owners (backed by ICONIQ Capital). Inside each community it mixes designer-furnished flexible-stay units with unfurnished long-term rentals, so the furnished inventory sits inside full-service residential towers.
Scale: Launched with 3,000 apartments across ten communities in seven US cities (2021 press release); a Dec 2024 refinancing covered six of its properties totaling 1,790 units. A current network total is not published.
Stays: Nightly stays up to 29 days plus furnished monthly stays, in amenity-rich high-rises.
What the supply model means for you
- Partnership and management models (Landing, Kasa, Sentral, Placemakr) spread across many buildings and cities; pricing can flex more because the operator is not carrying a lease on every unit.
- Lease-based models (Blueground) give the operator total control of the unit, usually with very consistent interiors, but the operator carries the rent, which shows up in pricing and stricter cancellation terms.
- Hotel-licensed buildings (Kasa, Placemakr, Sentral’s nightly product) can take short stays a leased apartment legally cannot, which is why short-stay coverage differs so much by provider on the length-of-stay slider.
Compare live prices in your city
Facts and figures on this page were read from each company’s own site or dated press coverage; scale claims carry the date they were published. Corrections: [email protected].