“Furnished” is one of the least useful words in a rental listing.
It can mean a wardrobe, a bed and a couple of lights. It can also mean a fitted kitchen, appliances, curtains, a dining table, sofas, beds and storage. Everything you need to arrive with a suitcase.
The listing calls both of them furnished.
One word, three homes
The three labels in circulation here describe a range, not a standard. Two of them mean almost nothing on their own.
Usually the most honest of the three, and rarely completely bare. Fans, lights and wardrobes often stay. Ask which, because “unfurnished” occasionally includes a kitchen and occasionally excludes a geyser.
The label that does the least work. It can mean wardrobes and a modular kitchen, or a single wardrobe and nothing else. There is no convention holding it in place, which is exactly why it is used.
Should mean you can move in with clothes and a laptop. Sometimes it means the previous tenant’s furniture stayed behind. Both get photographed the same way.
So the label is not the question.
What stays
Go through it item by item, in the flat, out loud. It takes four minutes and it is the cheapest four minutes of the whole tenancy.
Two of those lines are worth reading twice. Anything that needs servicing, whether the purifier, the ACs or the geysers, comes with a running cost and an argument about who pays it. Settle that while you are still deciding.
The inventory is the document
What you saw at the viewing is not necessarily what will be there on move-in day. Furniture goes to the owner’s other flat. An appliance stops working between the handshake and the handover.
A well-run tenancy has an inventory: item by item, condition noted, agreed before anyone signs and attached to the agreement.
It protects the owner from losing a fridge, and it protects you from paying for a scratch that was already there.
It is also the sheet your deposit is measured against.
