Between a Hotel Stay and a Year-Long Lease, Michael Lau Found a Business Worth Building
I've lived in the gap Michael Lau is building for: that space between a $150 hotel night and a twelve-month lease you don't actually want. When I found a platform built by someone who'd lived it too, I knew this story needed telling...
The suitcase has been unpacked long enough that the room no longer feels temporary. There are groceries in the refrigerator, clothes in the closet and a few everyday routines beginning to form. You aren't really visiting anymore, but you aren't putting down roots for the next year either.
Maybe work brought you to a new city for several months. Maybe you're relocating and need somewhere to live before deciding where “home” will be. Maybe you're a traveling medical professional, a remote worker with the freedom to move, or someone whose life simply doesn't fit neatly into a twelve-month lease.
Michael Lau believes people living in that in-between have been asked to make do with a rental market that wasn't adequately built around them.
“I build in the space between a hotel stay and a year-long lease.”
Michael is the founder of Keyseason, a platform focused on the one-to-six-month rental market. He has been actively investing in real estate since 2014 and has experience operating short-, mid- and long-term rentals. He has also experienced the market as a renter. His professional background includes leading teams at PwC, Accenture and AuditBoard.
By 2023, nearly a decade of experience in rentals had given him enough reason to believe there was room to build something different.
“As life becomes increasingly flexible, housing solutions should too.”
Trust Has to Start Somewhere
I understood the need for flexibility before I knew anything about Michael Lau.
I was already operating in the rental space, had used Airbnb and Furnished Finder, and was becoming increasingly interested in mid-term rentals when Keyseason landed on my radar.
I'd never heard of it.
I didn't know Michael.
And I wasn't going to assume an unfamiliar rental platform was trustworthy simply because it had a polished website.
So I checked.
I searched Michael. I searched Keyseason. I looked at the company through Google AI Mode and ChatGPT and paid attention to the systems surrounding the platform, including the verification and payment infrastructure. I wanted enough information to determine whether I was comfortable putting my property into its ecosystem.
Eventually, I was.
What makes that particularly interesting now is that my initial reaction to Keyseason illustrates one of the very problems Michael says he wants the company to address.
“You shouldn’t have to blindly trust someone you just met online.”
I agree.
That's why I didn't.
The internet has made it incredibly easy for two strangers to find one another. It hasn't necessarily made it easy for either of them to know whether the other person should be trusted.
When Browsing Becomes a Transaction
For a renter, that question becomes much more serious when browsing turns into a transaction.
The property looks good. The location works. The dates work. You've communicated with someone claiming to have the authority to rent it.
Now send them money.
Suddenly you want to know whether the property is real, whether the person is legitimate, what happens to your deposit and what recourse exists if something goes wrong. Michael even raises a distinctly modern concern: making sure the person on the other end isn't “an AI bot trying to scam you.”
Owners have their own version of that uncertainty.
Someone you've probably never met may be living in your property for months. You want to know who they are, whether the information you've received can be trusted and what happens when money, agreements or problems enter the relationship.
Keyseason is focused on building more structure into that middle.
There Are Already Rental Platforms. That's the Point.
Finding somewhere online to advertise a furnished property isn't particularly difficult.
I've already done that.
Using those platforms is also part of why another approach interested me.
Where Airbnb Still Works and Where the Gaps Begin to Show
Airbnb helped normalize the idea that people could book homes instead of hotels, and it created an enormous marketplace around that behavior. As an operator, however, I have plenty of opinions about what it's like to actually work inside that ecosystem.
Its review process alone can be infuriating.
Longer stays can expose another issue. A platform may allow a longer reservation without every part of the experience feeling designed around the realities of a months-long housing relationship.
For one of my longer stays, I needed my guest to receive and sign a separate rental agreement. Getting it signed wasn't the ridiculous part. Getting the completed agreement back to the guest through Airbnb was. I couldn't simply send the signed PDF through the platform's messaging system, so I ended up converting the agreement into individual image files and sending it back page by page.
Thirty pages meant 30 JPGs. And because I had no idea what time zone my guest was in at that moment, it potentially meant 30 separate message alerts arriving on their phone. Even when you personally know someone, nobody wants you blowing up their phone 30 times in a row.
Nothing says lack of technological progress quite like turning a lease into roughly 30 JPEGs.
That's one of the places where I think longer stays expose gaps in a platform that technically allows them. For 30-day-plus rentals, there should be a more practical way for owners and renters to exchange necessary documentation. That could mean allowing email information to be exchanged after a confirmed booking, providing secure document sharing within the platform, or allowing an owner to send a digital agreement or secure signing link directly through the reservation.
I already use a digital process for my 30-day-plus rental agreements through 17hats, and outside of that platform limitation, it's much easier.
The issue isn't that Airbnb prevents longer stays. It does. The issue is that some of the processes surrounding those stays can still feel as though they were built for a guest who's checking out after a few nights rather than someone entering a months-long housing arrangement.
That's what I mean when I say longer stays can be booked while parts of the process still have gaps and fall short.
My Furnished Finder Experience Was Different
Furnished Finder gave me a different kind of frustration.
Its focus on furnished rentals made sense for where I was headed, but after roughly a year and around $180 spent on my listing, I could count only a handful of contacts that felt meaningful. One became a substantial conversation. Others disappeared or went nowhere.
After enough questionable activity, I started wondering about the quality of some of the inquiries I was receiving.
That's my experience and my interpretation of it. I'm not presenting my suspicion as proof of what was happening behind the scenes.
But the feeling matters.
Trust isn't only something renters need.
Owners need confidence that the leads, people and systems they're spending time and money on are worth trusting too.
So when Michael says Keyseason's “sole focus is to make the mid-term rental market easier for everyone involved,” I'm interested.
Because I know enough to want to see what happens next.
More Than a Place to Post a Listing
That also means mid-term rentals aren't merely short-term rentals with more nights attached. The relationship begins to look different when someone isn't simply sleeping somewhere for the weekend.
They're living there.
They're buying groceries.
They're receiving packages.
They're learning which route gets them home.
They're developing routines.
For a while, that property is home.
That makes the infrastructure surrounding the relationship more important, not less.
A Small Company With a Much Bigger Goal
Michael describes Keyseason as a small team of operators with personal experience in the rental space rather than a large corporation entering the category because it spotted a financial opportunity.
He says the team isn't approaching the work with a big focus on “profits, upsides, or investability.”
His ambitions for the company, however, aren't particularly modest.
Michael wants Keyseason to grow from a transacting marketplace into the “default market for mid-term rentals.” He wants the name to become closely associated with the category and to be regarded as a trusted, helpful and reliable way for renters to find stays and owners to find tenants.
That hasn't happened yet.
And that's part of what makes Michael interesting to me right now.
We're meeting a founder while he's proving the idea can become as significant as he believes the problem already is.
There is no decade of Keyseason history to point toward as evidence that he was right.
There's an idea, a live platform, a small team, years of relevant experience and people willing to put properties on it and see what happens.
I'm now one of them.
Michael's Ambition Doesn't End With Keyseason
Ask someone what they're building and you'll learn about their business.
Remove the practical limitations and sometimes you learn something different about the person.
Michael's answer becomes much larger than a rental marketplace.
“I'd be working to create housing, feeding, and educating the entire world.”
He imagines what might happen if more people had the resources and opportunities necessary to use their creativity and ingenuity rather than spending so much of their lives worrying about basic needs.
“We have so many amazing, smart, and talented people in this world”
It's tempting to draw a straight line from that answer back to Keyseason.
I won't.
Michael didn't tell me that a desire to house the world is the reason he created the company, and I'm not going to manufacture an origin story for him because it would make a convenient ending.
But housing is there.
When asked to imagine what he would work on without the usual limitations, his thoughts go toward basic human needs and what people might be capable of if those needs were met.
That's worth knowing about the person behind the platform.
The Founder Beyond the Platform
So is the fact that the experienced startup leader and real estate operator apparently has another reputation among his friends.
His “tennis addiction.”
People are rarely only the businesses they're building.
Michael's advice to his younger self reflects that too. Work hard. Keep trying. Never stop learning. But also take care of your mind and body because neither can be taken for granted forever.
There is little value in building something sustainable if the person doing the building isn't treated as something worth sustaining too.
Somewhere Between Arriving and Staying
Keyseason doesn't need to convince me that there are frustrations in the rental market.
I've got my own list.
What it does have to prove is whether Michael and his team can build something meaningfully better around them.
Can a platform designed specifically for mid-term rentals create more confidence between owners and renters?
Can it make the mechanics of a months-long stay feel like they belong there rather than being squeezed into systems built with something else in mind?
Can Keyseason become the trusted market Michael imagines?
I don't know yet.
That's why I'm watching.
For now, return to the person we met at the beginning.
Their suitcase is unpacked. Their groceries are in the refrigerator. They've begun learning the neighborhood and settling into the small routines that turn an unfamiliar space into somewhere they can live.
They aren't on vacation.
They aren't staying forever.
They simply need a home that makes sense for where life has placed them right now.
On the other side is an owner with a property that might be exactly what they need.
Somewhere between those two people is a market Michael Lau believes should work better.
I know enough about that market to have my complaints.
Michael knows enough about it to have started a company.
Now let's see what happens when those two things meet.
Explore the People, Platforms & Tools in This Story
Want to explore some of the people, platforms and tools discussed throughout this feature? These are the places I'd point you toward next.
Keyseason
Michael Lau's platform is focused specifically on the furnished mid-term rental market, including the one-to-six-month space discussed throughout this story.
Explore Keyseason
Space City MJM™ on Keyseason
See my Houston property as it appears on Keyseason. This is the actual listing behind my experience joining the platform as a property owner.
View Space City MJM™ on Keyseason
Space City MJM™ on Airbnb
This is the Houston rental behind some of my firsthand hosting and longer-stay experiences discussed in this story. Airbnb remains an active part of my rental business, even as I've encountered areas where I believe its processes could better accommodate longer stays.
View Space City MJM™ on Airbnb
17hats
17hats is the business-management platform I use for my digital 30-day-plus rental agreement workflow, along with other business processes. It's the digital-document system I was referring to when discussing how much easier the rental-agreement process can be outside of the limitations I encountered with Airbnb messaging.
Explore 17hats through my referral link
Disclosure: This is my referral link. I use 17hats in my own business and rental-document workflow.
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