Back when I was a salesman at ReallyCheapFloors (before we brought in sharper and better-looking salespeople), I loved working with rental property owners and house flippers. Why? Because it was simple! For rental properties, the top priority when choosing flooring is always the price.
After all, the reason we are in the rental business is to make money. And the best way to make money is not to spend it! Or at least save where you can, which is where ReallyCheapFloors.com comes into play. Rental property flooring is a big market we serve and love as customers.
In this blog, we will not discuss flooring costs as much as we will flooring types and grades. My goal is to help you select the best flooring product for your home so that you get the BEST VALUE rather than the lowest price. A really cheap flooring product that needs to be replaced after each renter is not a good value. We need to save money initially on the flooring, but we also need to save money by purchasing flooring that doesn’t require frequent replacements. This is where the significant savings come from.
Residential Property Flooring vs. Rental Property Flooring
Emotion is always a part of the decision-making process when a homeowner picks out flooring for his or her new residential home. I get that. We want the perfect color or a specific texture. Maybe the width or grade of the flooring is important.
In the rental business, a 5” wide plank floor will not cause the rent to be higher than a 3” width one. Nor will Select flooring rent for more than a Cabin grade, in most cases. Indeed, in high-end homes, we should worry about using cheap flooring, focusing merely on price could reduce the value of the home. However, as most homes entering the rental market will be average to below-average in valuation, we can safely assume that using value-oriented flooring will not hurt the value of the home. However, the money saved will always be in the owner’s pocket, which is our goal.
3 Main Types of Rental Property Flooring
The 3 main flooring types we will discuss today are luxury vinyl planks or LVP, engineered hardwood flooring, and solid wood flooring. Each flooring category has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Your knowledge of what your property needs should allow you to select the most appropriate flooring for your home. If you aren’t sure what your rental property calls for based on the subfloor, your region’s climate, or if a high vacancy rate due to being a vacation rental can affect the performance of your flooring, call us today to discuss how these variables affect product selection.
1. Luxury Vinyl Plank
Luxury vinyl plank is today’s Golden Child. Inexpensive, tough, waterproof, and easily installed, this is an excellent choice for most rental properties. While most LVP flooring is waterproof, that also means pet-proof and kid-proof as well. Most also have an attached back, which will cut down some on sound. This is especially important in multi-family rental applications. If you want to learn more about luxury vinyl plank read our exhaustive luxury vinyl plank post to get the skinny on construction, manufacturers, and what separates a good LVP product from a bad one.
What makes LVP hard to buy is the available different construction types:
- Pure Vinyl Composition
- WPC or Wood Plastic Composition
- SPC Stone Polymer Composition
Pure Vinyl Composition
A Pure Vinyl composition is how most LVPs were made 4 or 5 years ago. Armstrong and Mohawk committed heavily to this construction. Armstrong is still making flooring this way at their factory in Pennsylvania, which I have visited. Pure Vinyl was a good product, but technology passed it by a few years ago. Today, some of your low-end choices at some of the big-box stores will be a pure Vinyl Core, but due to its lack of stability in wet areas, or direct sunlight, it is not an excellent flooring choice for investment property.
WPC – Wood Plastic Composition
WPC floors are much more stable. With companies like COREtec leading the way, WPC flooring offered vast improvements over the pure vinyl core, mainly due to being waterproof and more durable due to the layering used in the construction. At the beginning of the WPC product cycle, the price wasn’t a huge issue, and most products were well made. Inevitably, the retailer’s demands for lower prices resulted in flooring to be made with softer cores and fewer components. The result was a market filled with flooring that dents badly due to dropped items or even sliding furniture. WPC vinyl does offer a warmer feel as well as more sound deadening, due to the softer core, but that denting problem is a biggie in the rental business. Renters are known for not caring too much about taking care of your home. Why would they go easy on your flooring?
SPC – Stone Polymer Composition
Which leaves us with SPC vinyl flooring. Stone Polymer Composition. The newest generation of LVP flooring, and certainly great for a rental application. Why? Well, I will tell you:
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SPC vinyl flooring is tough. SPC products have stone construction, so this flooring is much denser than any other LVP floor. That means no denting. Can it be dented? Sure, but it is difficult. We have done tests in our warehouses on all kinds of flooring, mainly drop tests using 6-16 oz steel balls, and we never dented an SPC. From any height. It was impressive. We could drop a half poundball from 3 ft and dent a WPC product every time.
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Most SPC products are stable. Again, in the race to be the cheapest, retailers and manufacturers have started making some low-end products. How do they get the price down? By making inferior products, and excluding some components that add durability. The most common way is to leave off the bottom layer of the core, called the balancing layer. The reason this layer is there is to increase stability, and we need it. Do not buy any flooring that features a wear layer under 12 mils, as that product will not have the balancing layer. In my experience, manufacturers will not warranty these floors against separation or warping due to moisture or direct sunlight. At ReallyCheapFloors, we offer a 12 mil high-quality plank from Bruce for $1.39. While you might save a few cents buying 6 mil flooring, why would you take that risk? For a savings of 50 dollars on a 1,000 sq ft home, it is not worth the risk.
- SPC floors are cheap. As I said, we offer our Hazel Creek by COREtec for $2.39. That is a great deal of a 12 mil floor. And our color line is awesome! With Hickory, Oak, and Maple offerings, we should be able to meet any décor needs you have.
A luxury vinyl plank floor with an SPC core is one of the most appropriate floors for a rental property you can buy. I made the decision for Really Cheap Floors to go all-in on LVP. So we can offer free freight to several locations around the US for our Hazel Creek COREtec, including Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City. Saving money is the key to making money!
2. Engineered Hardwood Flooring
Now we can talk about engineered hardwood flooring. Let me preface this section with a disclaimer: I love wood flooring of any kind and may exaggerate slightly when discussing it’s positive features, and might even gloss over some of its weaknesses. I will apologize now, but not again. If you want a full construction break-down of engineered hardwood check out our blog What is Engineered Hardwood Flooring.
Wood flooring, whether solid or engineered, is classic, and looks expensive, even if it is a 69 cent engineered Cabin grade wood. If LVP has one downside, it is that it looks and feels fake. Are those 2 downsides? Hardwood is the go-to choice for flooring for hundreds of years and should continue for at least that long. It is cheap, environmental-friendly, and durable. Unlike LVP, most hardwood flooring is made in the USA. At ReallyCheapFloors.com, ALL of our hardwood is made in the USA.
How Engineered Hardwood is Made
Engineered hardwood flooring is made using layers of wood. This allows the flooring to be installed in areas where a homeowner cannot control the moisture in the subfloor well enough to keep solid hardwood flooring from expanding or contracting. We believe concrete subfloors are a great application for engineered hardwood flooring. Many homes with wood subfloors will also use engineered hardwood flooring, but other factors can cause this decision. Whether that is because of higher moisture environments due to no HVAC or proximity to water in streams or lakes, or due to the wider widths that are in high demand, engineered flooring offers us a wood product that will perform well in almost any environment.
I used engineered 5” in my last rental because it looked great, it was cheap, and I won’t have any of the problems associated with solid hardwood. I used a face sawn Somerset product from our Antique Collection. The Antique Collection features a wire-brushed surface that will minimize scratches, which will keep me from refinishing the floor if my current renter moves out. Cha-ching! Saving money! If you would like to know more about the construction of engineered flooring versus solid hardwood, please check out my earlier blog post on solid vs engineered hardwood floors.
Cabin Grade Flooring
We typically offer 3/8” thick engineered flooring in Cabin grade for $0.69-$0.89 per sq ft. These flooring options will contain a lot of shorts and natural and manufacturing defects, but the flooring will all be usable, with tongues and finish. We recommend that you purchase 10% waste, which will allow you to cull the worst 10% of the material. It will still be Cabin grade, with shorts and defects, but you can toss the worst offenders. Read more about our Cabin grade flooring here.
A smart upgrade available is our ½” thick Blue Label flooring. The floors will impress you with their 6 plys and face sawn construction, which results in an engineered floor that cannot be distinguished from a solid hardwood floor. These floors sell for $1.29-$1.99 per square foot, depending on the width and wood type you select.
3. Solid Hardwood Flooring
And that brings us to solid wood flooring. Prefinished solid flooring can be a great value and will perform for long periods. With the aluminum oxide finishes used today, you can forget about refinishing prefinished flooring, whether solid or engineered. Prefinished aluminum oxide finishes are the toughest and most reliable in the business.
The only problem with a prefinished solid, specifically, is the stability issue. If the moisture is not controlled in a home, cupping may be an issue. Cupping is caused when moisture in introduced to flooring, and it expands. Due to being nailed down tightly, expansion is a problem, resulting in the edges of the boards rising up. This can be caused by seasonal moisture or a busted water line. Either way, if it happens, it is a big problem.
Pick The Right Surface Texture
Besides that, solid prefinished wood can be a great choice in a rental, as it adds a level of appeal to a home that a vinyl plank or carpet floor cannot. Solid wood will have a premium wearlayer that resists scratches and wear.
When choosing wood flooring for a rental, consider the surface texture. A hand-scraped or wire-brushed surface will last longer in your home than a smooth surface. While this may sound like hyperbole or a fast sales pitch, I can assure you that these textured surfaces will not exhibit a change in appearance due to changes in the gloss level caused by surface abrasion over time. Imagine a dropped laptop on smooth flooring compared to the same drop on a hand-scraped product. Which flooring will show the dent the most? That is why we recommend scraped or brushed flooring. You can thank me later!
All 3 Options are DIY Friendly
All 3 of the flooring categories discussed today can be installed by anyone handy with tools and have a bit of patience. The absence of either of these qualities should trigger the hiring of a professional!
If you have further questions about our products or concerning your application, please do not hesitate to give us a call. All of our salespeople bring experience and glowing customer testimonials to make your call very informative, non-pushy, and as helpful as possible. They can be a great deal of help in helping you select your next flooring.
ReallyCheapFloors.com is the largest true liquidator of discontinued, downgraded, and overstock flooring in the USA. We do not stock every flooring option in production. However, every product in our inventory will be the lowest price you will find for any type, color, or construction on the flooring you want. We don’t have any fancy pricing guarantees. We know that you are smart enough to Google the competition to see we are typically the best price by a large margin!
What Determines the Best Flooring for Your Rental Property?
Choosing the right flooring product for your rental property is simply a matter of which option gives you the best return on your real estate investment. An option that offers low maintenance and expense with high durability is the goal, as renters are known to be hard on flooring. Whether you choose carpet, tile, laminate, wood, or lvp, look for a product that your tenant will appreciate and be able to take care of.
What Flooring Would I Choose for a Rental Property
In my brief experience as a landlord, I chose to use an engineered hardwood floor from Somerset in most of the house, with carpeting in the bedrooms. Featuring an 8 ply core and a Red Oak wood veneer the Cabin-grade option that I used required very little investment or maintenance, and my renters loved it. Keeping my renters happy made them less likely to call me over little stuff.
The Best Choice For 2024
If I were buying a floor for a rental property today I would use luxury vinyl either in a plank or tiles. LVP is easy to install as well as low maintenance, which are important to landlords everywhere. Whether you are doing a residential rental or an airbnb, your tenant will appreciate flooring that looks good and is easy to clean, while you will be happy that you didn't pay a high price for your flooring.
