Short-term vacation rentals had their decade in the sun, but the incentives have shifted. Municipalities keep tightening rules on stays under 30 days, nightly operations are labor-intensive, and revenue can be volatile even in good markets. At the same time, mid-term rentals—one to twelve months—have moved from niche to pillar, powered by a global surge in digital nomads and remote professionals who want stability, frictionless move-ins, and a place that works as hard as they do.
This isn't a mood swing; it's a structural re-balancing of demand. Put bluntly: if you manage properties and you're not deliberately courting this audience, you are subsidizing competitors who are.
The MBO Partners "State of Independence" finds 18.1 million American workers now self-identify as digital nomads—about one in ten U.S. workers, up roughly 147% since 2019. Even if you discount U.S.-centric counts, global trackers now estimate tens of millions of nomads and rising.
For a property manager, the implication is simple: this is not a trickle of influencers; it is a mainstream workforce behavior with a compounding addressable base.
Remote work has normalized rather than evaporated. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed post-pandemic evidence and found a sustained shift to remote/hybrid work with a positive association between increases in remote work and total factor productivity growth.
Stanford's "Working from Home in 2025: Five Key Facts" shows WFH levels stabilized after an initial post-pandemic drift and are highest in North America, the UK and Australia.
If knowledge work can be done from anywhere, the constraint becomes housing quality and reliability, not office proximity—naturally pulling demand toward furnished, work-ready, multi-month homes.
The regulatory chessboard keeps nudging capital away from nightly STRs and into 30-day-plus stays. Spain recently ordered 53,000 illegal tourist flats off platforms to protect housing supply. Greece advanced an overhaul restricting problematic STR conversions, including a one-year freeze on new licenses in central Athens districts.
U.S. cities continue to require new permits and enforcement for <30-day rentals, and industry monitors anticipate hundreds of state-level STR bills in 2025.
The overall direction is clear: nightly stays remain politically salient; multi-month stays are generally treated as housing, not hotels.
Remote professionals are not paying for concierge theatrics; they are buying frictionless productivity. The bundle they seek is simple: reliable high-bandwidth internet, ample natural light, noise discipline, temperature control, blackout options, and the comforts that make late sessions tolerable. For those who need it, a proper workstation setup (desk and ergonomic chair) can be a valuable add-on.
When those table-stakes are met, tenure lengthens naturally: one to six months is common because a quarter is a natural cadence to run a project, ship an engagement, or evaluate a new city. Operations simplify accordingly: fewer turnovers, fewer cleans, messaging that tracks weeks, not hours. For an accessible primer on the structural differences between mid-term and the alternatives, see LeaseRunner's guide and, for a landlord-facing comparison of furnished vs. unfurnished economics, see Apartments.com's resource.
Crucially, the unit economics are favorable relative to unfurnished annual leases and less spiky than nightly STRs. Across markets, furnished mid-term units command a premium over unfurnished because they package flexibility, furniture, and utilities.
Practitioner guidance reaches the same directional conclusion—higher monthly returns than unfurnished long-term while avoiding most hotel-style red tape. Business Insider's reporting on investors pivoting to mid-term for steadier cash flow, less regulation, and hybrid strategies provides a useful narrative template.
The message for PMs is not "copy the dollar amounts"; it's "copy the mechanism" within your local price dynamics.
You also preserve assets better when you stop churning tourists and start housing professionals. Nightly leisure traffic concentrates wear, cleaning chemicals, keys, linens and nuisance risk into tiny time windows—entropy by design.
Mid-term professional tenants use a property as home and office. Maintenance cadence becomes predictable, housekeeping becomes periodic instead of constant, and reputational risk falls.
The result is not a moral judgment about guests; it's an operating-model distinction with consequences for capex planning and NOI stability.
Exit optionality improves too. A building with documented, seasonally stable mid-term cash flows and minimal regulatory overhang looks less like a speculative hospitality bet and more like an operating cash-flow business.
Buyers underwriting predictable monthlies will generally pay more for a system they can underwrite than a promise they can't, especially where nightly STR licensing is a political football. For the macro context on how telework is reshaping local development opportunities—including in second-tier cities—see OECD's "The surge of teleworking" report.
Digital-nomad and remote-work visas have scaled from experiments to a durable layer of migration policy. Forbes counts 66 countries offering digital-nomad visas as of March 2025, while trackers such as Citizen Remote maintain a global index of "over 50" active programmes.
For PMs, this converts a gray zone into a predictable funnel: more professionals will be able to rent properly for three to twelve months.
Remote is no longer an ad-hoc perk; it has line items. Companies standardize stipends for connectivity, ergonomic equipment and, in some cases, lodging during remote assignments. See Compt's guide to remote-work stipends, Benepass on tax treatment of stipends, and travel-tech vendor overviews of "travel stipends" as a recognized allowance class.
None of this guarantees any one tenant's budget, but it pushes the modal remote professional closer to having a defined housing line item that maps directly to your mid-term offer.
Cross-border, digitally delivered services have multiplied since 2005; the World Bank's new Digital Trade Regulatory Readiness (DTRR) database tracks global regulatory capacity for digital trade.
When more of the value chain is delivered digitally, more of the workforce can be physically mobile without disrupting output; that directly feeds the segment—remote pros and nomads—that extends average length of stay from weeks to months.
Mid-term improves your portfolio's risk geometry in ways lenders and buyers understand. Nightly STRs are operationally convex but politically fragile; unfurnished annuals are politically simple but financially rigid.
Furnished mid-term sits between those poles: you earn a relative premium to unfurnished annuals, occupancy is smoother than nightly, and legal surface area is smaller because you are on the "30-days-plus" side of the line.
The data flywheel you build in mid-term is more valuable than the one you build in nightly. Nightly platforms own the guest relationship; their algorithms become your TAMI—Total Addressable Margin of Intermediation.
A direct-lead or subscription channel for mid-term professionals lets you own the PII, the conversation, and the feedback loops—what amenities extend stays, which price points trigger extensions, what notice periods correlate with renewals.
The output is not just higher NOI; it's better operational half-life per staff hour. This is why a credible mid-term channel is not a "nice to have" but a strategic hedge against platform dependency (and why even category leaders are openly searching for new growth vectors; see Airbnb's recent discussion of slower growth and reinvention focus).
nBases exists to professionalize mid-term housing for people who live and work on the move. The premise is deliberately simple: if remote professionals and digital nomads are going to comprise a durable share of the global workforce, they deserve housing designed for production, not for postcards.
That's why nBases focuses on the core features that translate into superior tenure and lower friction: reliable high-bandwidth Wi-Fi, quiet by design, temperature control, warm lighting in the evening, on-demand pro cleaning, washing machine access, and bathrooms with adequate hot-water capacity and proper fixtures. For property managers who want to go the extra mile, we also offer premium add-ons like ergonomic workstations (desk + ergonomic chair) and 24-inch-plus monitors to attract the highest-paying remote professionals.
These core features are the environmental baselines that keep a professional productive for months. Because nBases is not a nightly marketplace, the economics align with owners and PMs: no commissions on bookings, a clean subscription for listing and distribution, and direct guest communication so you retain the relationship.
That keeps your unit economics intact and lets us focus on distribution quality, trust, and standards enforcement rather than taking a rake. It also fits the regulatory moment: our core use case is 30-days-plus, which cities generally classify as housing rather than hospitality.
Put all of this together and the strategic picture is clean. Mid-term rentals aimed at digital nomads and high-earning remote professionals give you more stable months, less operational entropy, lower regulatory exposure, and stronger relative yields than unfurnished annuals—without the volatility tax and political fragility of nightly STRs.
If you operate through a platform that respects your margins—subscription access, no commission, direct guest contact—you keep control of your unit economics and your brand relationship with the tenant.
The market tailwinds are at your back; the only variable now is whether your product keeps pace with what remote professionals already expect: a home that functions like an office and a stay that feels like a plan.
Ready to transform your property management? Join our network and start attracting high-quality, long-term tenants who value productivity and stability.
Antoine Charrier, Founder nBases
