Should I use carpet or a hard surface floor for a rental property?

Should I use carpet or a hard surface floor for a rental property?

Steve: So one question I get often from people that are doing rentals; because we do a lot of business in rental properties, is should we put in carpet or should we put in a hard surface in areas like the family room and those types of things.

And the answer is really it just depends on what type of tenants that you have and whether or not you are looking for a more long-term solution or not. Carpet is a great solution for rentals because it’s inexpensive, you can replace it often and it’s a quick and easy thing on the installation side to do.

If you think you may have some turnover or you just know that your tenants may ruin the floor, carpet is a great choice for that.

Hard surface is a little bit more long-term. Usually it’s going to cost you about double whatever the cost of the carpet might have been to a hard surface even an inexpensive one. Both of those are install prices of course.

But if you do a hard surface, the benefits can be really nice because even if they do damage a piece of flooring you may be able to replace just that one piece. And it is also easier for tenants to keep up with cleanup.

So sometimes you do save yourself from having to do replacement for say maybe two or three times what you might for carpeting.