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Covid has driven six-fold increase in medium-term rentals

Leading corporate relocation site says pandemic has significantly altered customer behaviour.

Nigel Lewis

medium term rentals renting

One of the UK’s largest online corporate renting platforms says the pandemic has driven a six-fold increase in demand for medium-term rentals in the UK.

Homelike, which specialises in quality furnished properties, says the trend has been created as the corporate relocation market has re-awoken as the country has moved out of lockdown.

The platform also claims that the pandemic has driven the medium-term corporate rentals market online and that half of all bookings for stays of over 30 days are now booked digitally.

Homelike, which is based in Germany but says 60% of its bookings are generated by UK rentals, also has a business in the US.

Family and friends

It says that although corporate relocation is still its key market, many of its customers have also been using medium-term rentals to be closer to family and friends during and after the pandemic in the UK.

The corporate relocation property market took a hammering during Covid, with business people reluctant to cross borders within Europe to take up jobs when most were able to work from home.

Homelike says people in the UK carried on using its service last year but booked longer stays as the pandemic required people to keep travel to a minimum.

Average rents have also dropped as demand for corporate relocation properties weakened overall.

homelike rentals“It’s interesting to see how the UK market differs from our other regions in terms of bookings. It’s much more balanced across all areas, rather than being solely driven by business travellers,” says the company’s UK representative Cherry Wang.

Her company has 75,000 properties listed on its platform across Europe including in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, Liverpool, Bristol and Cambridge.

Read more about corporate renting news.

April 29, 2021

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