I’m no corporate housing expert, but I have met dozens across the globe in the past 6+ years of building Landing. My area of not quite expertise rests in building and rapidly scaling companies. Mostly those that are creatively attacking consumer problems to deliver a better, more cost effective, or consistent customer experience. I’ve spent two careers worth of time building solutions across the hospitality sectors touching on food delivery, hotels, and multifamily apartments. None of these industries operate like corporate housing, a world in which the consumer is blurred across a barrage of resellers.
The collaborative teamwork, the protectionism, simultaneous advancement of technology across key players, and the ability to survive make it something truly special that is worthy of a Harvard case study by an author better than me. As the lines between hospitality and multifamily rapidly merge, will corporate housing as we know it today survive?
How Corporate Housing Came to Be
First a brief history lesson on corporate housing learned from someone who has read a lot, but most importantly spoken, befriended, and hired the tribal leaders who have passed on tacit knowledge of the category they built.
The story effectively begins with Howard Ruby, the visionary founder of Oakwood, who pioneered the serviced apartment and scaled it into a global standard of over 25,000 units.
Oakwood achieved this scale by owning the physical apartment buildings they operated, allowing them to perfectly balance supply and demand without the friction of a middleman. However, the industry’s DNA shifted fundamentally when Ruby sold the empire to Marriott International, who eventually divested the real estate and spun off the corporate housing business.
This transition, which eventually saw the brand land with the Korean powerhouse Mapletree, gave rise to the “lease-matching” era. Because no single apartment owner had the scale or operational expertise to manage a national brand, operators began leasing individual units from multi-family owners to resell them as temporarily furnished units.
The Rise of Lease-Matching and Regional Fragmentation
From this shift, and the strategic wisdom of leaders like Tom Atchison, National Corporate Housing emerged as large corporate housing brands who would opportunistically lease units when they had demand. But as Oakwood fractured, hundreds of jettisoned executives became regional experts founding boutique companies that collaborated to share furnished apartment supply, spinning local demand into a $12 billion U.S. corporate housing market.
This collaborative web eventually sought digital efficiency, birthing the “bid board” era through platforms like ReloQuest, 360, and Owl. These became the digital town squares where Relocation Management Companies (RMCs) like Cartus, Graebel, and Weichert could source inventory. Originally, RMCs bundled corporate housing as a loss-leader to capture the “real money” in home sale commissions and moving fees. But the landscape is shifting.
How Hybrid Work Transformed Demand
According to WERC data, the hybrid work revolution has caused a sharp decline in traditional permanent moves. Today’s executives often prefer a “Mobility Wallet” or a lump-sum reimbursement over a rigid relocation package, choosing to handle the logistics themselves in an online world.
This has widened the gap between the executive “white glove” move and the rank-and-file employee, while simultaneously empowering global brokers like Synergy, SilverDoor (newly merged), and Sirva/BGRS who serve-up multinational companies relocation needs to dedicated bid-board platforms.
These brokers now sit between the RMC and the supplier, creating a confusing world where a single apartment might receive five bids from five different suppliers at five different price points. RMC’s have preferred suppliers, brokers have preferred suppliers, and national suppliers have preferred regional suppliers.
Much like “blood diamonds” finding their way onto the fingers of unsuspecting brides, this hidden layer of white-label agreements and sub-leasing means that the end-user often occupies inventory that has been passed through so many hands, the original intent of the guest experience is lost and the pricing is outrageously high.
When Venture Capital Disrupted Industry Norms
This is not an exaggeration. I once sat with the most talented executive team in the global mobility space who said they couldn’t trust Landing’s supply because our price was too low.
Our national scale and direct wholesale pricing didn’t compute in a world of resellers.
Fortunately, we raised our price and were able to find a path forward. But the key word in this conversation was trust. The corporate housing industry was built by a network of former colleagues who know and trust the service being delivered which made it possible for a reselling network to exist. Venture backed start-ups seeking high growth often at the expense of consistent service have cracked the trust that is the foundation in this industry. This distrust is not without reason.
Companies like StayAlfred, Zeus, and Sonder have come and gone. Their attractive pricing led national and regional players to utilize their services only to be left scrambling to find solutions when they stopped paying rent to the apartment owners and their customers were locked out leading to painful and embarrassing dominoes of difficult conversations.
Why Prospective Leasing Always Fail
It should be noted that Landing is not without blame. Starting in 2019 we made the mistake of thinking we knew better than the corporate housing pros by building a business focused on consumers. But as we stacked up leased apartments, sought ancillary corporate revenue streams, and slashed prices to fill them we learned similar lessons. Fortunately, Landing is completely out of the lease business and has no incentive to fill vacant units at low costs as we partner directly with owners to manage their units in exchange for a share of the revenue.
Each of these venture backed companies had to learn a lesson that the corporate housing industry has known for decades, prospective leasing does not work. Renting and furnishing an apartment in pursuit of demand that can be sold at premium has always been a losing game if you play it long enough. This is why the regional corporate housing companies work for multiyear contracts with secured demand or lease apartments for less than 12 months at a time, paying huge premiums for the flexibility of temporary apartments and furniture rental that are passed on to each layer up the supply chain.
This lease matching business is hard work with thin margins. It’s easier to establish trust and use someone else’s supply trading profit for peace of mind. The bid-board world has encouraged that behavior. These digital marketplaces encourage and monitor time to respond to requests as projects are awarded often inside of 24 hours. It’s not easy to get a 3 months rental rate from a multifamily leasing office and a rate from your preferred furniture rental company as it is to call or email your network and ask what they can sell an apartment for. National networks of supply with realtime pricing and availability like Landing or Level Hotels provide a faster more consistent option while aggregators or other furnished apartments like Airbnb or Blueground provide a plethora of options.
These solutions coupled with the aforementioned declining demand have led to decline of true suppliers. The companies like Landing who have furnished apartments and on-site managers and cleaners standing by for demand have diminished as few have access to supply that is not leased nor owned like Oakwood originally did.
Ultimately, the laws of economics dictate that supply and demand will always find an equilibrium, and for the corporate housing industry, that rebalancing is already underway. As hybrid work and lump-sum relocation budgets suppress traditional demand, the crowded field of regional players will inevitably thin out, making the gatekeeping relationships held by RMCs and brokers more competitive and protective.
Yet, the bid-board culture that was designed to drive prices down has fundamentally backfired, creating a “race to the bottom” that sacrifices the guest experience for the sake of a digital transaction. As regional providers continue to vanish, we are seeing a shift where national aggregators like Blueground increasingly host others’ inventory, further distancing the paying customer from the person actually holding the keys. The bid-board platforms will be forced to consolidate or radically diversify just to survive in a world of diminished supply.
A Return to the Proven Basics
At Landing, we believe the only way out of this “confusing mess” is to return to the foundational principles that Howard Ruby first established at Oakwood. By moving away from the brittle “lease-matching” model and focusing on a national supply chain that isn’t built on a house of cards of sub-leases and white-label agreements, we are removing the layers of resellers that have historically inflated costs and diluted quality. We aren’t a bid on a board; we are the direct link between the apartment owner’s physical asset and the executive guest.
In an era where trust has been fractured by failed startups and opaque pricing, Landing is bridging the gap offering national scale with the transparency and consistency that today’s self-directed, mobility-focused workforce actually demands. The future of corporate housing isn’t more middlemen; it’s a shorter, clearer path home.
