Furlow Stays is Glen and Natalie. We own the properties you'll find here, we've run rentals on both sides of the border, and we manage a small number for other owners — small enough that you'll always be dealing with one of us.
We both grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, met at university in Ottawa, and moved back to Toronto for our first jobs — Glen into capital markets, Natalie into urban planning. Then Glen's bank moved him west, and Calgary turned out to be home for the next ten years.
Alberta is where the rental business started. Canmore is an hour up the highway from Calgary, in the mountains, and it runs one of the strictest and strangest short-term rental regimes in Canada — the sort of place where what your property is permitted to do was decided before you bought it. Learning to operate there, in a market that unforgiving, is the reason we check the rules before we discuss revenue rather than the other way round.
Florida came after that, and the Gulf coast is where the business is now. We own four condos in one Clearwater complex and a house besides, we've owned two more Clearwater homes previously, and we run properties for a handful of other owners across the southeast. At our busiest we've had eleven going at once, on both sides of the border — which is also how we learned what it's like to be the owner who isn't there when something goes wrong at midnight.
Every one of those was furnished by Natalie, listed by us, priced by us and cleaned by people we chose. That's the whole of the pitch, really: nothing we'd do for another owner is something we haven't already done on our own money first.
An urban planner and a former capital markets trader, running short-term rentals across two countries. It is a strange combination and it turns out to be exactly the right one.
You're booking from the people who own the place, not a call centre. That means the answer to "is there a coffee grinder" comes from someone who's stood in that kitchen, and a problem at 10pm reaches somebody who can actually fix it.
It also means booking direct is genuinely cheaper — there's no platform taking a cut in the middle, and we pass that on rather than pocketing it.
We cap what we take on at twelve owners' doors. Not a marketing line — it's the number at which we can still walk every property regularly and answer our own phone. When we're full we'll tell you and point you toward someone decent.
Before any of that, we'll tell you what your property is actually permitted to do. Sometimes the answer is that it shouldn't be a short-term rental at all, and we'd rather say so early.
Lakeland, Florida, a short drive inland from the coast, with our family and a dog who is unaware that any of this is a business. The Clearwater properties are about an hour away, which is close enough to be there the same day and far enough that we don't turn up unannounced.
Glen carries both passports, which is less of a novelty than it sounds and more useful than you'd expect — we've run this business under two tax regimes, two sets of rental law and two currencies, and neither country surprises us any more.
Booking a stay, or wondering what your property could do. Both go to the same two people.