Long-term rentals are now publicly available in TIDY. We’ve been testing these for a while, and today we’re opening them up to everyone. There are real differences between long-term rentals and short-term rentals, and some similarities too, so before getting to the features I want to explain how we think about the category.
What counts as long-term?
For this purpose, long-term is generally anything over 30 days. The reason for that is mostly tenancy laws. In a state like California, once you hit 30 days, the occupant gets a bunch of tenant rights, and so you incur a different set of risks than short-term rentals. You need to account for those. Tenant screening, contracts, things like that.
This applies to what is historically known as mid-term rentals as well. All the compliance requirements kind of fall in there. A 45-day stay for a traveling nurse feels like hosting, but the law mostly sees a tenancy.
Operational burden vs. legal risk
Short-term rentals are kind of the most operationally heavy. Turnovers after every stay, guest messaging at all hours, nightly pricing. But they carry with them less risk of certain kinds, because a guest doesn’t accrue tenant rights.
Mid-term rentals have medium operational burden and high legal risk. Once you cross that 30 days, you have high legal risk.
Then long-term rentals have more or less the same legal risk, but even less operational burden. Maybe one turnover a year.
One of the benefits of TIDY has always been that we ease the operational burden. Now we’re helping to ease the compliance burden as well.
What that means in practice
We can now do tenant applications, screenings, rental agreements, and more. The screening piece is the part we get asked about most: full FCRA-compliant reports through TransUnion SmartMove, covering credit, income vs. rent, criminal background, and eviction history. The applicant authorizes their own report, so you never touch an SSN. And if you decline someone, the adverse action notice goes out automatically, which matters more than most people realize.
Leases get e-signed right from an approved application, with templates for fixed-term leases, month-to-month agreements, renewals, pet addenda, move-in/out checklists, and notices. Rent collection has autopay, reminders with a payment link, and a hosted pay page, and every payment posts to the lease ledger on its own. There’s a rent roll, per-lease ledgers, deposit tracking, and a tenant portal where tenants pay rent and submit maintenance requests.
Of course, there are also different channels for mid-term and long-term rentals, in addition to short-term. We support a wide range of listing channels to book your property: Zillow, Apartments.com, and Zumper for long-term, Furnished Finder for mid-term, next to Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com. One calendar across everything.
Why this matters for owners
Most property managers only do one or the other. They only do long-term, focus on compliance, and have weak operations. Or they only focus on operations and have weak compliance. If your manager only does one thing well, that becomes your strategy, whether or not it’s the one that makes you the most money.
TIDY gives you the best of both worlds. You can make the best strategic decision over time, including seamlessly switching between strategies as they make sense. A common case: switching between short-term and mid-term rentals with the seasons. Nightly rates in summer, a furnished 30+ day stay through the winter. Doing that well requires the compliance expertise of a traditional long-term property manager and the operational expertise of a traditional short-term manager. At the same time. That’s the combination we’ve been building toward.
Pricing is unchanged: 3.9% of gross bookings or rent. And since long-term rentals barely have turnovers, cleaning & maintenance management is included at no extra cost.
What’s next
A few things are still in the pipeline: room splitting, roommate agreements, and the ability to list rooms individually. You can do this today, sort of. Per-room leases and per-room applications exist. But we’re working on improvements to make renting by the room a first-class thing.
We’re very excited about this release. With it, TIDY handles the full spectrum of residential property management strategies. If you’ve been waiting for us to handle your leases, this is it. Read more about TIDY for long-term rentals, or talk to an expert and we’ll walk you through it.