FurnishedFinder.com is a popular website used by travel nurses to find housing. As a travel nurse, you are typically provided a housing stipend so you want to find the most affordable housing, to pocket as much money as you can from the stipend. Some travel nurses prefer to just rent a room for a few hundred dollars a month instead of an entire apartment for over a thousand or more per month.
As a traveling nurse practitioner, the agency will often provide housing. Sometimes the options provided are subpar or you may want to opt for a housing stipend instead. This is where furnishedfinder.com comes in. This site is similar to Airbnb but specifically for travel nurses listing midterm furnished rentals. Instead of short stays, the owners are looking to rent out these homes for at least a minimum of 1-3 months. As a result, they tend to me more affordable than Airbnb these days.
I have used furnished finder several times by now. I have had mostly good experiences. The apartments provided have been furnished and cute, and fairly priced. For example, in Florida I have been able to find 2-bedroom furnished apartments (including utilities and cable) for less than $2500/month. This is in comparison to Airbnb where monthly listings are often over $3500/month.
To date – I only had one bad experience. This was actually for my housing in Jacksonville. The landlord was hard to reach leading up to moving in. And when it was move in day, she told me to wait a few hours to make sure the cleaning lady finished. By night time, she asked if I could find another place to stay for the night. This rubbed me the wrong way because I had booked the apartment 2 months in advance so it was no surprise when I was supposed to check in. And I figured if she was already hard to get a hold of, imagine how much worse it could be once I am living in her property and having an issue.
So, I told her to just cancel the stay and provide me a refund. Fortunately, my agency was able to quickly put me in a hotel for the week until I moved into another apartment I found on furnished finder. The only downside to this website is that there is no “money back guarantee”, the way there is with Airbnb. Furnished Finder is just a platform for owners to list properties and for travel nurses to find them. Payment and leasing agreements happen directly between owner and renter. As a result, no fees are charged.
I have not heard of anyone being scammed through this website but be sure to proceed cautiously and do your due diligence before sending payment. Luckily, I didn’t feel “scammed’ by the landlord in Jacksonville since she was the one that insisted we facetime prior to the agreement. She just ended up being unprofessional and losing my business.
