Furnishing a rental is a pricing decision and an operations decision at once. You put an asset inside the unit, charge more rent for it, and take on the cost of replacing it. Whether the trade works comes down to four things: who rents in your submarket, how long they stay, what your province lets you hold as a deposit, and what a reset costs between tenancies.
Start with the tenant pool, not the furniture
A furnished unit does not attract a wealthier version of your usual applicant. It attracts a different one: someone who is not moving a household in.
That group is narrow. Relocating professionals on fixed contracts. Medical residents and travelling health staff. Graduate students. People between homes after a sale or a separation. If your unit is not within reach of a hospital, a university, a large employer or transit that serves one, the pool may be thin.
Check before you spend a dollar. Search your submarket on the portals you would list on, filter for furnished, and count what is standing and how long it has been live. Four furnished listings that have all sat for two months are telling you something, and it is cheaper to learn from someone else's vacancy than your own.
The deposit gap is the part most landlords miss
A furnished unit puts thousands of dollars of your property inside the tenancy. What you may hold against damage to it is fixed by provincial law, and it does not scale with what you put in the room.
- Ontario. No damage deposit, no security deposit, no pet deposit. The only permitted deposits are a rent deposit, capped at one month's rent on a monthly or yearly tenancy, and a key deposit limited to the key's replacement cost. The rent deposit must be applied to the final month of rent, so it is not available for damage. Ontario's standard lease guide treats terms requiring deposits the Act does not permit as void, and CLEO sets out the limits.
- British Columbia. A security deposit of up to half a month's rent, plus a pet damage deposit of up to half a month's rent if you allow pets. The two together cap out at one month.
- Alberta. A security deposit of up to one month's rent, set at the start of the tenancy. It cannot be raised later, even when the rent goes up.
Read that against a furnished unit. In Ontario you hand over an apartment of your own furniture with no deposit behind it, and recovery means an application to the Landlord and Tenant Board after the fact, with the burden on you to prove condition. In British Columbia and Alberta you have something, but one month of rent does not replace a sofa, a mattress, a dining set and a television. That does not make furnishing a bad idea. It makes it an uninsured position you should size deliberately.
Do the break-even before you buy anything
The arithmetic is short. Take the monthly premium a furnished unit earns over the same unit empty, multiply by the months you expect it occupied in a year, then subtract the annual cost of owning the furniture: replacement cost divided by the years it survives tenant use, plus what each turnover adds in cleaning and repair.
Put your own numbers in. As an illustration, spend six thousand dollars furnishing a unit and have the contents last five years, and that is twelve hundred a year before anything breaks. A premium of one hundred dollars a month covers the furniture and nothing else. Two hundred starts to look like a business. Those figures are placeholders: pull the real premium from live listings and price the furnish from a real cart.
Two things bend the calculation. Furnished tenancies tend to run shorter, so you turn the unit over more often and each turn costs more. And vacancy stings harder, because the furniture depreciates whether anyone is paying for it or not.
The costs that never make it into the spreadsheet
- Turnover labour. An unfurnished turn is clean, paint, repair. A furnished turn is all of that plus inspecting every item and replacing what is worn.
- Storage. The first strong applicant who wants the unit empty leaves you needing somewhere to store a household of furniture.
- Insurance. Landlord policies are usually written around the appliances and fixtures you own, not an apartment of contents. Ask your broker what your contents limit is before you buy.
- Condition evidence. Every item you supply is a possible dispute, so a furnished unit needs a dated, itemized photo record at move-in and move-out. In British Columbia and Alberta the inspection report is what preserves your right to claim against the deposit, and there is a sequence you have to follow.
The middle option people skip
Partly furnished gets less attention than it deserves: appliances, window coverings, a bed frame, a table, basic lighting. It costs a fraction of a full furnish and is far less of your property to lose. Where a submarket shows some furnished demand but not enough for a full fit-out, start here.
Which answer fits your unit
Furnish when three things are true together: there is visible furnished demand in your submarket, the unit is small enough that a fit-out costs a few thousand dollars rather than many, and you could absorb the loss of the contents without it changing your year. Stay unfurnished when the unit is family sized, when your renters are locals moving their own things, when you manage from a distance, or when the listed premium does not clear the furniture's annual cost.
How to decide this week
- Pull every furnished listing in your submarket and record asking rent, unit size and days live. Do the same for unfurnished comparables. The gap is your premium, and the days live say how real it is.
- Price the furnish for real: build the item list, price it at one retailer, add delivery and assembly.
- Divide that total by the years you expect it to last, then add the extra turnover cost per year.
- Compare that against the premium multiplied by the months you expect it occupied.
- Check your province's deposit limit and ask whether you could lose the contents outright and shrug. If not, furnish less.
The answer is not the same for every unit you own. A one bedroom near a teaching hospital and a three bedroom in a commuter suburb are different businesses, and the second has no reason to own a sofa. Run the numbers per unit, from local listings.