Key Takeaways from the blog
- Solve rising costs and admin overload in employee housing.
- Improve employee comfort and reduce relocation stress.
- Know what to look for in a trusted housing platform.
- See why corporate housing beats hotels.
- Ensure your provider truly meets business needs.
Are you grappling with the right corporate housing solutions for your business? Let’s face it; housing employees for both the short and long term is not as simple as just choosing hotels. When we speak to HR, mobility, and travel leaders across organizations, there are several common challenges that they cite. The first problem is the global shortage of proper housing solutions, particularly temporary housing. Rising costs make it costlier to provide housing for several companies as well, while there is also the need to provide proper quality, employee well-being, livability, and personalization.
These are some hurdles plaguing companies in terms of finding the right executive rentals, along with compliance risks and evolving expectations of employees (more customized guidance and amenities). What’s your best option to fix these problems? Corporate housing solutions, without a doubt. You’ll find corporate housing providers offering spacious and diverse furnished apartments near major business hubs worldwide. These platforms are excellent places to discover rental housing specifically tailored to the needs of businesses. Sounds interesting? Let’s learn more about it below.
The Struggles of Managing Employee Housing
There are several key challenges of managing employee housing, as you’ll already know. Some of them include:
- Costs: One of the biggest hurdles for corporate temporary housing is the rising costs. Costs linked to staff, cleaning, maintenance, utilities, and housekeeping add to the overall expenses, along with the property expenditure.
- Unsettled Employees: If you’re relocating employees or shifting them temporarily on assignments, they may suffer from higher anxiety and stress. This may impact their productivity and focus, while leading to high turnover rates and employee dissatisfaction.
- Admin Overload: Managing a portfolio of corporate stays is complex, inclusive of payments, leases, agreements, maintenance requests, and so on. Then there are compliance needs and other regulations, covering local safety, building, and guest laws. This puts pressure on the administrative teams of companies tasked with managing these affairs.
- No Consistency Across Cities: Every city has its own unique real estate or property market. Housing availability also varies across global cities, making it hard to set up a standardized housing program. You’ll also face issues in zeroing in on housing models that work in every city. What works in one location may be unsustainable or impractical in another; thus, there’s a customised approach that you’ll have to figure out for every location.
Employees shifting from one city to another will naturally look for consistency in their living experiences. With your expansion to new cities, housing challenges automatically get magnified, requiring massive investments in local expertise and infrastructure.
How to Choose a Trusted Corporate Housing Platform
How can you choose the right corporate housing platform to fix all these difficulties seamlessly? Here are some criteria worth noting in this regard.
- Transparent Pricing: Your HR/mobility team will naturally want a corporate accommodations platform with a transparent pricing model. Make sure the provider offers all-inclusive pricing covering vital services, without hidden costs. The setup and support fees should be clearly mentioned, along with expenses for API access.
- Verified Quality: Select platforms that offer a verified list of properties, thereby guaranteeing their consistent quality and reliability. You should look for providers that offer virtual tours, high-quality photographs, proper descriptions, and detailed information on corporate apartments. The properties should be in safe locations with suitable security features as well.
- Centralized Booking: You should only choose a provider offering a centralized booking platform. There should be a seamless online booking process with digital check-ins and user-friendly features for managing payments and reservations. A centralized system also simplifies the procedure for your HR teams to book and manage multiple units. For example, platforms like TheSqua.re offer quick booking features with prompt support and guidance.
- Global Reach: You’ll naturally want a platform that offers corporate rentals in multiple global locations, including major business hubs. So, the need of the hour is a vast property network and multiple housing choices for your employees. It also ensures local knowledge and expertise in various places, which will help you navigate varying environments.
- Employee-First Design: The properties should have intelligent and spacious layouts with vital amenities like high-speed internet, kitchens, appliances, housekeeping, laundry facilities, and so on. They should be situated near transportation hubs, workplaces, and local amenities like eateries and grocery stores. Personalized support for employees should also be available to meet their unique needs.
Corporate Housing vs Hotels: Why Platforms Are Becoming the Go-To
Corporate relocation housing is a huge market today, as you’ll already know, with more companies expanding their global presence and the rise of digital nomadism and remote work. So, why are dedicated corporate housing solutions trumping hotels? Why are these housing platforms gaining traction among companies or employers? Let’s find out below:
- Cost: So let’s say you have a group of people traveling to another city for a longer period. Can you imagine the costs of booking multiple hotel rooms and other add-on costs for such durations? It’s way higher than your expenses for dedicated corporate housing apartments with varying configurations, more space, and all amenities for lower costs throughout the stay.
- Comfort: See, hotels offer standard room services, but don’t have that home-like feeling for longer trips or temporary relocations. They have smaller spaces and fewer private amenities as well. Corporate housing units, on the other hand, offer spacious residential apartments that feel like home with full furnishings, appliances, separate kitchens, bedrooms, and living spaces etc. They ensure a sense of comfort and normalcy, helping your employees cope better with the shift.
- Scalability: You’ll always be constrained by the size of the hotel and its ability to handle bigger groups. However, individual needs for higher comfort will always be limited in nature. Corporate housing platforms offer higher flexibility through a vast network of verified properties. You can easily scale accommodation needs in multiple locations without any hassles.
- Admin: Hotels need you to manage all individual bookings, often with separate approvals and payments. Sounds tedious, right? Corporate housing platforms help you with centralized bookings. So, for instance, if you book corporate furnished rentals from TheSqua.re, a reputed platform, you can expect easy compliance, verified listings, single-window bookings for multiple properties, and prompt support in one place. This lowers the admin load considerably for your HR or travel managers.
So, companies prefer these platforms over hotels for relocations and dispatching employees for projects and short/long-term assignments. They prefer the enhanced home-like experience and space for employees in a bid to boost their wellbeing and productivity. Then there are higher cost savings, more standardization and predictability, simpler compliance and management, and more control and flexibility.
TheSqua.re, for instance, offers higher employee comfort with spacious and home-like units, while offering more financial control and independence for companies and their employees alike.
How to Know You’re on the Right Platform
It’s not always easy to find the top 10 corporate housing companies and filter among them. How do you know you’re on the right platform? Here is a checklist that will help you choose.
1. Support Employees Worldwide
- Vast network of properties in global locations
- Prompt round-the-clock support for employees during their stay
- Personalized global support mechanisms with full standardization & consistency
2. Adaptable for Short & Long Stays
- Flexible long and short-term leases
- Easy lease extension
- Convenient lease terms
3. Visibility Into Spends
- Clear and all-inclusive pricing
- Zero hidden costs
- Reporting & analytics
- Easy tracking and management of housing costs
4. Reduces Admin Load
- Swift and simplified centralized booking process
- Easy booking tracking and management
- Easy payments and full compliance with corporate policies
5. Positive Employer Feedback
- A bigger proportion of positive reviews from employees using these units
- Ample customization, key amenities, and employee-centric operations
- Direct link to higher employee productivity and morale
Already have a provider? If your provider doesn’t check these boxes, it may be time to consider solutions like TheSqua.re to fix all your problems in one go!
Tips for Getting the Most From Your Corporate Housing Provider
So, now that you’ve understood the key benefits of corporate housing platforms, how do you get the most out of your provider? Here are some actionable tips worth using:
- Start with a pilot: Test the provider’s services with a smaller group of employees before the full rollout. Define some metrics for success like onboarding time and user experience. Check the request response times, since housing issues clearly don’t wait for office hours!
- Ask about integrations: Enquire about the integration of your existing tech stack with the provider’s systems, i.e. HR, travel management, accounting, and so on. Evaluate the quality of the integration process as well.
- Gather feedback: Seek regular feedback from your employees during the pilot and ongoing usage. Understand their experience and specific needs. Actively listen to perspectives and address their concerns promptly. See how the provider supports you while doing the same.
- Check support levels: Understand the responsiveness of the provider, check the support channels, and response times. See whether they’re working with you more like a partner and offering support proactively.
Insights from the Market: Why More Companies Are Moving to Housing Platforms
Why are more companies moving to corporate housing providers and dedicated platforms? What does the market tell us? Let’s find out:
- Rising travel costs: Fluctuating and gradually increasing costs for hotels make them unsustainable for many companies.
- Employee well-being: There is increased focus on employee comfort and well-being. Companies now know that managed and safe spaces are vital for employee productivity and morale.
- Need for consistency: Lack of standardized quality and comfort in multiple housing options worldwide leads to inconsistent employee experiences. This can be resolved by the right corporate housing platforms.
- Higher workforce mobility: Global and mobile workforces need tailored, flexible and adaptable housing solutions that may be centrally and efficiently managed.
So, housing platforms naturally standardize the quality of housing and employee experiences, while giving you full visibility into the proceedings and improving duty of care. You can uphold this better to your employees with consistent support and also track your data and analytics in real-time. So, if you’re looking for a trusted partner with global reach and a wonderfully curated network, TheSqua.re is the best solution.
How the Right Platform Transforms Company Workflows
If you’re with the right platform, it will undoubtedly transform your company workflows. Here’s how:
- Lower Costs: You’ll find flexible leases and lower costs for properties, considering all-inclusive pricing, amenities like well-equipped kitchens, and special corporate booking packages.
- Less Admin: Centralized bookings and management help reduce admin overload, along with prompt employee support.
- Happier Employees: You’ll make your employees happier with spacious and home-like accommodation, excellent service, tailored amenities, and productive yet safe spaces.
- Better Visibility: Track bookings, costs, and other data from a central platform, while understanding employee needs better.
Your HR, mobility, and travel teams can focus more on high-value tasks without getting into repetitive bookings or spending time on gaining local expertise/information across multiple global locations. Scale at will while managing everything in one place with full visibility- what’s not to like?
Final Thoughts: Housing That Works for Businesses and People
As you can see, there are several dedicated corporate housing platforms and providers that give you just what you require, i.e. balance. You can strike the perfect balance between business efficiency, cost savings, practicality, and employee comfort and well-being. The best platforms give you huge global reach and housing consistency along with transparent pricing, prompt support, and personalized guidance. You can easily solve all your housing challenges, while reducing the administrative load on your HR and mobility teams alongside.
With various solutions, companies are proving that housing can be both cost-effective and people-friendly. Discover how leading corporate housing providers like TheSquare are helping businesses simplify housing needs while supporting employee well-being. Here’s to simplifying your housing needs and making your employees happier with the right platforms.
