Temporary accommodation sounds like a reasonably well-defined relocation benefit.
An employee needs to spend six months in Toronto. You search the corporate housing market, identify suitable furnished apartments, compare locations and rates, and select one.
The apartment has furniture. It has a kitchen equipped with things one generally expects to find in a kitchen. There are linens and towels. Utilities and internet are typically included or easily arranged. The employee arrives with a suitcase and can, more or less, start living there.
Now send the same employee to Sarnia for six months.
The relocation policy may provide exactly the same temporary accommodation benefit.
Almost everything about delivering it can be different.
In a major city, six months is a product
Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary have substantial furnished accommodation markets designed around stays that fall somewhere between a hotel visit and a conventional residential lease.
Six months is not an unusual request. It is a product the market knows how to sell.
That distinction matters.
In a smaller centre, there may be hotels and there may be long-term residential rentals, but very little inventory occupying the space between them.
The problem therefore isn’t simply that there are fewer temporary accommodation choices.
The product you are looking for may barely exist.
At that point, the search changes.
You may have to enter the permanent rental market
If there is no suitable furnished six-month inventory, the next place to look is often the conventional residential market.
Now you may be able to find the right apartment or house.
Unfortunately, the landlord wants a one-year lease.
This is not an unreasonable landlord being difficult. The landlord is selling a one-year product into a market where one-year tenants exist. A six-month tenant creates another leasing event, additional turnover and potentially a period of vacancy six months from now.
So the question becomes whether the landlord can be persuaded to provide something they did not originally intend to provide.
That may require an experienced destination services professional to identify appropriate properties, approach landlords and negotiate a shorter term. It may also require paying a premium.
That premium can initially look like poor value.
It may actually be the entirely rational price of asking a landlord to assume the economic risk of a six-month lease.
We now have a property.
We do not yet have temporary accommodation.
The apartment is empty
Conventional rental inventory is generally unfurnished.
So furniture needs to be sourced.
For a six-month stay, furniture rental can make sense. A bed, sofa, dining table, chairs and other basics can be delivered before the employee arrives and collected when the assignment ends.
But that introduces another supplier, another cost and another set of logistics.
Someone needs to coordinate delivery. Someone needs access to the property. The furniture needs to be there before the employee arrives. At the end of the stay, the process runs in reverse.
And we still aren’t finished.
The employee probably wants sheets.
The surprisingly expensive business of owning a fork
Corporate apartments make a great many mundane objects disappear into the nightly rate.
Sheets. Pillows. Towels. Plates. Glasses. Cutlery. Pots. Pans. A toaster. A kettle. A garbage can.
None of these items is particularly interesting until you need all of them on Tuesday.
Housewares and linen packages can be rented, but over six months the economics can become surprisingly unattractive. There is a point at which renting ordinary household goods costs enough that everyone involved should stop and ask why we are renting them.
Buying may be cheaper.
That creates its own questions. Who purchases everything? Who sets it up? What happens to it six months later? Can it be donated, given to the employee or otherwise disposed of responsibly?
None of these is an insurmountable problem.
There are simply rather a lot of problems that did not exist when we booked the furnished apartment in Toronto.
Then come the things nobody thought were accommodation
Internet needs to work.
Electricity and perhaps gas need to be established. Tenant insurance may be required. Furniture deliveries need coordinating. The employee may need parking.
And limited housing inventory can force compromises elsewhere.
The best available six-month property may be farther from the work location than anyone would have chosen in a larger market. Solving the accommodation problem can therefore create a transportation problem.
There is also the employee’s expectation to consider.
“Six months of temporary accommodation” quite reasonably sounds like a turnkey benefit. The employee probably does not distinguish between purpose-built corporate housing and an unfurnished residential lease that the relocation program is converting into temporary accommodation behind the scenes.
Nor should they have to.
If this approach is going to work well, somebody needs to manage the assembly of all these pieces so that, from the employee’s perspective, the result still feels like a home they can walk into.
Flexibility has a value too
There is another difference that can be easy to miss when comparing monthly rates.
Purpose-built temporary accommodation is designed around temporary people.
Assignments are not always.
A six-month assignment becomes four months. A project is delayed. The employee is needed for another three months. Immigration timing changes. The permanent move happens sooner than expected.
A conventional residential lease negotiated into a six-month term may offer considerably less flexibility when circumstances change.
That risk belongs in the cost calculation as well.
The least expensive solution on day one is not necessarily the least expensive solution when the assignment refuses to behave exactly as planned—which assignments occasionally have the discourtesy to do.
At some point, do the entire calculation
This is where temporary accommodation decisions in smaller centres can go wrong.
It is easy to compare a hotel or extended-stay rate with the rent on an apartment and conclude that the apartment is substantially cheaper.
But rent is not what you are buying.
You are trying to create a functioning six-month home.
The real comparison may include:
Residential rent + short-term lease premium + destination services search and negotiation + furniture rental + housewares + linens + utilities + internet + insurance + delivery and removal + administration.
Once those costs are assembled, the answer may still be the residential rental.
In fact, it can be an excellent solution. It may provide considerably more space, privacy and normality than six months in a hotel.
But sometimes the extended-stay property with the rather alarming nightly rate starts looking less alarming.
Because it already includes most of the things you are otherwise going to have to create.
The right answer may also be a hybrid
There is no reason every component has to follow the same model.
Perhaps the property should be leased and the major furniture rented, while linens, kitchenware and small appliances are purchased because six months of rental makes little economic sense.
Perhaps a hotel is appropriate for the first two weeks while a residential property is assembled.
Perhaps paying a landlord a premium for a six-month lease is still considerably cheaper than the available extended-stay alternatives.
Or perhaps, once every cost and every piece of administration is counted, the hotel really is the better answer.
The purpose of the exercise is not to prove that one model is cheaper.
It is to understand what each model actually costs.
The policy will probably say none of this
This is one of the peculiarities of relocation policy.
The policy may say that an employee is eligible for temporary accommodation for up to six months.
That sounds admirably consistent.
An employee going to Toronto and an employee going to Sarnia have received precisely the same benefit.
Except one benefit can be purchased from an established market with a few phone calls or searches.
The other may require a destination services professional to find a conventional property, persuade a landlord to accept a different lease term, arrange furniture, establish utilities, equip a kitchen and make sure there are towels in the bathroom when the employee arrives.
The policy is identical.
The benefit is not.
Temporary accommodation is sometimes something you have to build
This is why smaller-market temporary accommodation requires a different way of thinking.
The first question should not simply be:
What does a six-month apartment cost?
It should be:
What will it cost to create a functioning six-month home in this particular market?
In a major city, temporary accommodation is often an inventory search.
In a smaller centre, it can become an assembly project.
Neither is inherently better or worse. But they require different expertise, different cost calculations and, sometimes, different expectations from the relocation program.
Because the expensive part of temporary accommodation is not always the accommodation.
Sometimes it is making it temporary.
