If you own a house or townhome in Cranberry, Warrendale, Adams Township, Seven Fields, or Mars, you live next to one of the busiest corporate corridors in western Pennsylvania. Westinghouse has its global headquarters on Westinghouse Drive in Cranberry Township, and the Cranberry Woods and Thorn Hill business parks around it are full of other employers. All of that brings a steady flow of people who need somewhere to live for a few months.
Who’s looking for a home up here
An executive relocating with a family needs a place to land while they house-hunt. A project team comes in for 30 to 90 days. A consultant is on site four days a week. A new hire starts before their lease does. Right now most of them end up in a hotel along Route 228, or in a furnished place in the city with a 25-to-30-minute drive each way.
Ask any of them what they’d rather have and the answer is a furnished house with a kitchen, a driveway, a desk, and laundry. We hear from these guests through our Cranberry corporate stays guide and our corporate housing and extended stays pages. There aren’t many professionally run furnished homes in the corridor to put them in.
Why this works for a suburban home
A corporate stay runs a month or longer. That means one guest, one clean, and one move-in rather than a new arrival every weekend. The guests are working professionals, and often an employer is covering the bill. The house sees less wear and the income is steadier, including in winter when nightly bookings around Pittsburgh slow down.
The corridor also sits outside City of Pittsburgh limits, so the city’s short-term rental rules don’t apply. Township rules do, and they differ from one township to the next. Before we take on any home, we check what applies at that specific address.
What we do, and what it costs
Rivers & Steel City Homes has managed furnished rentals in the Pittsburgh area since 2018. For a corporate home we handle the listing, the pricing, guest and employer communication, cleaning, restocking, and maintenance calls. You get a monthly statement that shows every stay and every expense.
The money works like this: we take what a stay brings in, subtract the cleaning fee the guest paid, and you keep 75% of what’s left. The cleaning fee never comes out of your side. If the home needs furnishing, that’s a separate, optional service. It runs from about 15% of the project when you do the buying and we coordinate, up to about 30% when we handle everything. If the place is already furnished, it costs nothing.
Some homes up here will do better as a regular long-term lease, and we’ll say so if yours is one of them. Commute to the business parks, parking, and a workable office space are what we look at first.
