Furnished or Unfurnished: The Difference Nobody Mentions

Almost every rental listing in Ho Chi Minh City is furnished, and for a two-year posting that is the obvious choice: no shipping, no buying, no selling at the end. The trade-off is usually discussed as one of taste, or of whether the furniture is any good.

There is a second trade-off that agents do not raise. A furnished apartment comes with soft items that have had previous occupants, and in a building where tenancies turn over every year or two, that mattress has had several.

What actually carries risk in a furnished flat

Not the wardrobe, the dining table or the television. The items that matter are the ones that are soft, seamed and slept on: the mattress, the bed base, the sofa, and to a lesser extent the curtains and rugs.

Those are also the items least likely to have been replaced between tenancies, because they are the most expensive things in the flat and the hardest for a landlord to justify replacing while they still look presentable.

What to ask before signing

• How old is the mattress, and has it been replaced during this tenancy cycle?
• Was the apartment professionally cleaned after the last tenant, and is there a record?
• How long has it stood empty? — this matters for the drains as much as anything.
• Can the mattress be replaced as a condition of the lease? Ask this at the negotiation stage, not later.

That last one is more often agreed than people expect, particularly on a longer lease, because the cost is small against a year of rent and the landlord keeps an improved asset.

The inspection to do at viewing

Lift a corner of the mattress and look at the seam and the label area. Look at the headboard where it meets the wall. Look under the sofa cushions and at the underside of the frame. It takes two minutes and nobody will think it odd — plenty of people check for stains.

Also look under the kitchen sink and at the floor drains, which tell you how the flat was maintained rather than what is in the furniture.

The case for unfurnished

If you are staying three years or more, unfurnished is usually cheaper overall and it removes this category of risk entirely, because everything soft in the apartment is yours from new. It also removes the inventory argument at the end of the tenancy, which is the other reliable source of deposit disputes.

The obvious cost is furnishing a flat, and the second-hand market makes that cheap — with the caveat that the same soft-item rule applies there too.

There is a middle option that people overlook. Many landlords will remove furniture they own if you ask, so a flat listed as furnished can become part-furnished without a rent change. Keeping the wardrobe and the dining table while supplying your own mattress and sofa is often the best of both, and it is a request that costs the landlord nothing but storage.

Serviced apartments are a separate case

A serviced apartment or aparthotel has a much higher turnover than a private lease — sometimes weekly — which increases exposure, but it usually also has a proper housekeeping regime, a maintenance team, and a pest management contract with records. In our experience the well-run ones carry less risk than a private furnished flat with an absentee landlord, precisely because somebody is checking between occupants.

What to ask there is simply whether there is a pest management contract and who holds it. A good operator answers immediately.

What to do in the first week either way

Wash everything washable at the highest temperature the fabric allows, including curtains if you can get them down. Vacuum the bed base, the sofa frame underside and the skirting, and empty the vacuum outside. Then do the inspection again a fortnight later, because a small population that was invisible on day one is visible by then and is still trivial to deal with.

Related reading

Before signing, see the pre-move-in inspection checklist and who pays, landlord or tenant. For the first weeks, your first month in a Vietnamese apartment. If you are buying to fill an unfurnished flat, buying second-hand furniture safely. Serviced properties are covered in serviced apartments and aparthotels. Our parent company runs the Vietnamese-language residential programme.

Global Pest Control is the English-language arm of Khử Trùng Toàn Cầu, based in Thu Duc City.

Common questions

Can I ask the landlord for a treatment before I move in?

You can, and on a furnished flat it is a reasonable request that is often granted, particularly if you raise it during negotiation rather than after signing. Where the landlord declines, paying for it yourself on an empty apartment is inexpensive and it is the easiest access anyone will ever have to that property.

Is a mattress protector enough?

It helps considerably and it is worth buying regardless, because a properly fitted encasement traps anything already inside the mattress and stops anything new getting in. It does nothing about the bed base, the headboard or the frame, which is where evidence more often appears, so treat it as one measure rather than the answer.

The flat has been empty for six months. Is that better or worse?

Better for anything that needs a host, since bed bugs and fleas decline without one, though both survive longer than people expect. Worse for the drains, which will all be dry, and worse for anything stored in cupboards. Fill every trap on day one and check the kitchen cupboards before you use them.