Furnished Finder is the leading two-sided marketplace for monthly furnished rentals, connecting landlords with traveling professionals, remote workers, and relocating families seeking stays of 30 days or more.
With a growing network of over 300,000 listings and more than 240,000 landlords nationwide, Furnished Finder connects over 6 million renters annually to real homes in real communities across the United States. In 2025, Newsweek named Furnished Finder one of America's Best Online Platforms, ranking it #1 in the Real Estate category. Today, the company continues to redefine flexible housing for the modern renter.
Furnished Finder offers a transparent, people-first rental experience in which landlords list their properties, tenants submit booking inquiries, and both parties communicate directly to determine fit before formalizing a lease—without booking fees or hidden costs.
With an average length of stay of three months (and often longer through extensions), facilitating the right landlord-tenant match is critical, making communication especially important at two high-intent moments in the journey: the initial inquiry and qualification phase, and the booking coordination phase.
During the initial inquiry phase, landlords and tenants exchange essential information, such as intended length of stay, reason for travel, and tenant screening details, to assess fit and build confidence.
The booking coordination phase then builds on that trust, requiring clear, timely communication to align on move-in dates, lease terms and house rules, pricing, and logistics before a lease is signed.
Together, these moments are where trust is established, decisions are made, and where Furnished Finder has the greatest opportunity to add value by enabling transparency, confidence, and smoother outcomes for both sides.
The Challenge: Off-Platform Conversations Limited Trust And Visibility
Before implementing Stream Chat, Furnished Finder relied on a custom-built messaging solution. In practice, many conversations quickly moved off-platform to email, phone calls, or text messages. This created blind spots across the marketplace.
Once conversations left the platform, the Furnished Finder team lost visibility into whether interactions were productive or even legitimate.
Trust and safety risks involving harmful content, such as scams, spam inquiries, and inappropriate behavior, were harder to detect.
At the same time, the team lacked insight into response rates and conversation quality, which made it challenging to help landlords improve their rental performance.
Most importantly, off-platform communication prevented Furnished Finder from surfacing relevant services such as tenant screening, lease templates, and property damage protection at the exact moments when users were most likely to benefit from them.
Why Stream: A Reliable Foundation Without The Cost Of Building In-House
Furnished Finder evaluated building chat in-house but ultimately decided against it.
Delivering a modern messaging experience requires reliable real-time delivery, read receipts, typing indicators, push notifications, offline support, and message history across web and mobile.
Building and maintaining that infrastructure would have required significant engineering investment for functionality that was not core to the company's differentiation.
Stream Chat provided a production-ready foundation that met Furnished Finder's non-negotiable requirements. Reliability was the top priority. Beyond that, the team needed React and React Native SDKs to support native web and mobile experiences, flexibility to build marketplace-specific workflows around chat, styling control to ensure chat felt fully integrated into the product, and full ownership of messaging data for analytics, moderation, and internal systems.
Designing Chat For A Two-Sided Marketplace
Furnished Finder structured chat conversations around individual inquiries, ensuring each conversation is tied directly to a specific property listing.
This approach provides clear context for both landlords and renters and reduces confusion, especially for landlords managing multiple properties and conversations simultaneously.
Keeping communication on-platform also allows Furnished Finder to introduce trust signals and tools at the right time.
By giving users the freedom to communicate directly while maintaining a protected chat environment, Furnished Finder differentiates itself from competitors by ensuring users can maintain control of vetting each other and completing bookings without leaving the platform.
Fast Time to Value with Stream
Using Stream, Furnished Finder launched in-app conversations quickly.
The team had chat live on web and mobile behind a feature flag within one week and rolled it out to the broader user base over three months.
Most of the engineering effort focused on migrating data and bridging the new system with the old one to support a gradual transition.
In total, the project migrated 50 million messages and required three engineers over three months. Furnished Finder estimates that building the base functionality provided by Stream would have required at least twice the engineering effort, not including the ongoing maintenance costs.
Post-migration, the Furnished Finder team saw a 10% increase in unique daily users interacting with in-app chat.
Trust and Safety at Scale with AI Moderation
Trust and safety have been a priority for Furnished Finder from day one. As an online rental marketplace, common risks include scam attempts such as fake listings and impersonation, spam inquiries that waste landlords' time, and inappropriate or harassing content.
With thousands of conversations happening daily, manual review was not sustainable. Furnished Finder introduced AI-powered moderation alongside Stream Chat to automatically detect concerning patterns in real time.
AI moderation allows the team to identify issues that are difficult to catch with traditional pattern matching, while remaining invisible to legitimate users. Conversations stay natural and friction-free unless clear policy violations or fraud patterns are detected.
The operational impact has been significant. Tasks that previously required a team of nine can now be handled by fewer people, allowing the broader trust team to focus on more complex and nuanced cases rather than routine review.
Business Impact: Chat As The Hub Of The Marketplace
With Stream Chat fully embedded, messaging has become a foundational part of the Furnished Finder platform.
40,000 users interact with Stream Chat in Furnished Finder daily. Reliable, contextual communication helps landlords and tenants coordinate faster, reducing friction and drop-off in the booking funnel.
Keeping conversations on-platform preserves context, such as listing details and booking inquiry history, saving users time and increasing efficiency.
Just as importantly, on-platform chat creates high-intent merchandising opportunities. When a landlord and tenant are getting serious about a booking, Furnished Finder can surface services like tenant screening, lease creation, and damage protection at exactly the right moment to support them.
From a platform perspective, chat is no longer just a communication feature but the central hub through which users run their rental business.
Advice for Other Marketplace Teams
For Furnished Finder, the biggest lesson learned was recognizing just how strategic messaging is to a marketplace's long-term success.
"Don't underestimate the importance of owning the conversation," says Bryan Campbell, Chief Architect at Furnished Finder. "If your users are communicating off-platform, you're missing critical signals about trust, intent, and where your business is actually happening. Chat isn't just a feature. It's visibility into your marketplace, protection for your users, and a surface area for monetization."
Beyond owning the conversation, Furnished Finder advises marketplace teams to be realistic about build versus buy decisions and to invest in moderation earlier than they think they need to.
Building a reliable, modern chat platform is a substantial engineering effort that rarely differentiates a marketplace, while starting moderation early helps shape user behavior before risky patterns become entrenched.
Instrumenting messaging from the beginning gives teams the data they need to understand what is really happening inside their marketplace.
Looking Ahead
As Furnished Finder continues to grow at a rapid pace, messaging is evolving from a communication layer into a workflow backbone. The team plans to add richer context, automation, and more proactive moderation for 2026 so that conversations guide users through the entire rental process.
In the future, chat will not only support communication but also orchestrate key actions such as tenant screening, lease creation, and booking next steps, making it the foundation of every successful booking.