Posted on Monday, May 05 2025
However, corporate housing can be a terrific resource for endeavors that need flexibility and scalability for multiple people over time. Corporate housing delivers home-like environments with kitchens, laundry and extra space that can be an effective, cost-efficient alternative to hotels for a wide variety of projects.
Here are some of the situations in which corporate housing can support business:
Enterprise IT development at a client site: Large digital transformation projects can take months, from needs assessment to build, test and launch. What’s more, integration can involve multiple specialist teams to work together for weeks at a time. Flying these professionals back and forth from head office to the client site – not to mention putting them up in hotels for extended periods - can be logistically challenging and add hundreds of thousands to the budget.
Corporate housing allows your organization to provide accommodations that are not only more comfortable and spacious than hotel rooms, but are also typically half the cost. What’s more, furnished rentals have fully-equipped kitchens, which means your staff don’t have to order all their meals from room service or restaurants.
Relocation that doesn’t have to be permanent. Global mobility professionals say that as many as half of all employee relocations go sideways in the first year, either to misaligned expectations or poorly-understood requirements. This can be costly for both the organization and for the employees, especially if they’ve broken a lease or sold a home and taken on a long-term lease or bought a home in their new location.
Corporate housing can allow employees – and their families – to sort of ‘test drive’ their new location. This might look like the employee taking a one-bedroom furnished rental for a month or two, or bringing the whole family to a furnished home for a few months while they get their bearings in the new location. This kind of flexibility can be the difference between a successful relocation and a failed one.
Healthcare teams. Many hospitals in Canada now need temporary healthcare professionals on a medium- or even long-term basis, from nurses to administrators to surgical teams. Forcing these people to locate housing to rent or buy, then managing the moving process and getting them settled, can add unacceptable delays and stress to people who are needed quickly and to be focused on their work. (And it goes without saying that the expense of hotels and per diems aren’t even an option.)
The immediate availability of corporate housing’s furnished rentals and the fact that they’re fully equipped with furniture, bedding, linens and kitchen equipment, ensures that healthcare professionals can be on-site in as little as a day or two from initial request. What’s more, corporate housing is scalable, so healthcare facilities that need 8 residences this month but 12 next month and 30 the month after can be easily accommodated.
Construction crews. The RLB Crane Index says that the GTA has more construction cranes than any other city in North America, and across Canada, there are residential, commercial and industrial construction sites that struggle to fill all their open vacancies from the local labour market.
Development companies often turn to national recruiting to fill these positions: A team building a power plan in Moncton may involve construction professionals from across Ontario, Quebec and the eastern provinces; a team developing a new suburb in New Westminster, BC, may have recruited from across the province and well into Alberta or even the Yukon.
In the old days, development companies might have put these workers up in bunkhouses or trailers on site, but with more competition for skilled trades, they’ve had to offer better accommodation to incentive the best workers. That’s where corporate housing can make a huge difference.
Corporate housing can provide everything from large furnished homes that can accommodate multiple workers at once, to furnished studios and one-bedroom apartments that can make the difference between a project that comes in on time and budget because worker turnover was minimized and a project that is halted by a lack of skilled tradespeople willing to make the commitment.
How Premiere Suites can help.
As the largest provider of corporate housing in Canada, we’ve worked with thousands of organizations around the world, providing accommodation from nursing and construction teams to IT project teams and setup of new corporate headquarters. With more than 1500 furnished suites, homes and townhomes across Canada, plus a network of more than 10,000 more, we’ve got accommodations to suit just about everyone!