--- title: "Furnish a Short-Term Rental for Less With Minoan | Addicted to ROI" description: "How we used Minoan, a free membership, to get trade discounts at Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main while furnishing our short-term rental, including a $400 savings on one Article order." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://addictedtoroi.com/#organization", "name": "Addicted to ROI", "url": "https://addictedtoroi.com", "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://addictedtoroi.com/images/logo.png" }, "description": "Live your best life funded by your investments. 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Built an 8-figure rental portfolio across multiple states and teaches everyday investors how to build passive income.", "worksFor": { "@id": "https://addictedtoroi.com/#organization" }, "sameAs": [ "https://agentsinvest.com", "https://doorprofit.com", "https://repstime.com", "https://strhours.com", "https://kidspayroll.com", "https://rentstager.com" ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "mainEntityOfPage": { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://addictedtoroi.com/blog/how-we-saved-money-furnishing-a-short-term-rental-with-minoan/" }, "headline": "How We Saved Thousands Furnishing Our Short-Term Rental With Minoan", "description": "How we used Minoan, a free membership, to get trade discounts at Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main while furnishing our short-term rental, including a $400 savings on one Article order.", "image": "https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556228453-efd6c1ff04f6?w=800&q=80", "datePublished": "2025-11-28", "dateModified": "2025-11-28", "author": { "@id": "https://addictedtoroi.com/#jennifer" }, "publisher": { "@id": "https://addictedtoroi.com/#organization" }, "speakable": { "@type": "SpeakableSpecification", "cssSelector": [ ".tldr-answer", "h1" ] } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://addictedtoroi.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Blog", "item": "https://addictedtoroi.com/blog" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Optimize", "item": "https://addictedtoroi.com/blog?category=optimize" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "How We Saved Thousands Furnishing Our Short-Term Rental With Minoan", "item": "https://addictedtoroi.com/blog/how-we-saved-money-furnishing-a-short-term-rental-with-minoan/" } ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "Is Minoan free to use?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes. Signing up for Minoan is free. There is no membership fee. Minoan makes money on the brand side, so you get access to trade-level discounts across hundreds of home and furniture brands without paying anything to join." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Which brands does Minoan work with?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Minoan works with hundreds of brands. The ones we used most while furnishing our short-term rental were Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main. They also carry many other home, furniture, electronics, and decor brands, and you shop them all through one Minoan cart." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Can Minoan beat an Article Pro trade account?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "In our case, yes. We had an approved Article Pro account and still found that ordering the same furniture through Minoan saved us about $400 on one order. We canceled the Article Pro order, got refunded, and reordered through Minoan instead." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does Minoan help with returns and refunds?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes. When a design firm specced furniture that did not fit our space, Minoan's customer service handled the returns for us and the longer refund window on those orders meant we were not stuck with pieces that did not work. Buying through Minoan put their support team between us and the brands." } } ] } ] --- [![Addicted to ROI](/images/logo.png)](/) [Travel](/pillars/travel/)[Real Estate](/pillars/real-estate/)[Tax Savings](/pillars/tax-savings/)[Business](/pillars/business/)[Paths](/paths/)[Blog](/blog/)[Tools](/tools/)[Apps](/software/)[About](/about/) [Login](https://members.addictedtoroi.com/) Subscribe [Travel](/pillars/travel/)[Real Estate](/pillars/real-estate/)[Tax Savings](/pillars/tax-savings/)[Business](/pillars/business/)[Paths](/paths/)[Blog](/blog/)[Tools](/tools/)[Apps](/software/)[About](/about/)[Login](https://members.addictedtoroi.com/) Contents 1. [01 What Minoan actually is ](#what-minoan-actually-is) 2. [02 The $400 moment that sold me ](#the-400-moment-that-sold-me) 3. [03 The design firm mistake that Minoan quietly fixed ](#the-design-firm-mistake-that-minoan-quietly-fixed) 4. [04 A quick before and after ](#a-quick-before-and-after) 5. [05 Who this actually makes sense for ](#who-this-actually-makes-sense-for) 6. [06 How to get started ](#how-to-get-started) 7. [07 A few questions I get asked about this ](#a-few-questions-i-get-asked-about-this) [Home](/)/ [Blog](/blog/)/ [Business](/pillars/business/) Optimize # How We Saved Thousands Furnishing Our Short-Term Rental With Minoan Furnishing a short-term rental can quietly eat your whole budget. Here is how a free membership called Minoan saved us real money, including a $400 swing on a single Article order, plus the refund window that bailed us out when a design firm got the dimensions wrong. November 28, 2025 9 min read Contents 1. [01\. What Minoan actually is](#what-minoan-actually-is) 2. [02\. The $400 moment that sold me](#the-400-moment-that-sold-me) 3. [03\. The design firm mistake that Minoan quietly fixed](#the-design-firm-mistake-that-minoan-quietly-fixed) 4. [04\. A quick before and after](#a-quick-before-and-after) 5. [05\. Who this actually makes sense for](#who-this-actually-makes-sense-for) 6. [06\. How to get started](#how-to-get-started) 7. [07\. A few questions I get asked about this](#a-few-questions-i-get-asked-about-this) tl;dr Minoan is a free membership that gives short-term rental owners trade-level discounts at brands like Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main, all in one cart. We saved real money furnishing our rental, including $400 on a single Article order that beat our own Article Pro pricing. Their customer service also gave us a longer refund window that saved us when a design firm specced furniture that did not fit the space. I want to talk about the part of short-term rental investing that nobody puts in the pretty Instagram photos. The furnishing bill. You buy the property, you get the loan figured out, you survive the permitting (which for us once dragged out eleven months on [a garage-to-Airbnb conversion](/blog/garage-to-airbnb-conversion/)), and then you walk into an empty house and realize you have to fill every single room before a guest will pay you a dime. Beds, sofas, dining tables, rugs, lamps, the TV, the little stuff in the kitchen. It adds up fast, and it adds up quietly. A full furnishing budget on a short-term rental can run anywhere from twenty to fifty thousand dollars depending on the size and the finish level you are going for. So when I tell you we saved thousands on that bill using a free tool called Minoan, I mean it changed the math on the whole project. Let me walk you through exactly how. ## What Minoan actually is Minoan is a membership that gives you trade-level discounts at a long list of home and furniture brands. Think Wayfair, Article, Samsung, Joss & Main, and a few hundred others. The brands they cover are the ones you were already going to shop for a rental anyway. Here is the part that surprised me. It is completely free to sign up. There is no membership fee, no annual cost, nothing. Minoan makes its money on the brand side, so as the buyer you just get access to the discounts and one cart that pulls all those brands together. You add what you want from across different brands, you check out, and the savings are already baked in. When I first heard "free membership that gives you discounts," my guard went up. That usually means the discounts are tiny or the catalog is junk. Neither was true here. The discounts were real, the brands were ones I actually wanted, and the whole thing took about five minutes to set up. ## The $400 moment that sold me I have to tell you this specific story because it is the one that made me a believer. I was ordering some contract-grade furniture from Article for the rental. Contract-grade matters for a short-term rental because the pieces take a beating from guests, so you want furniture built to hold up. I had already gone through the work of signing up for Article Pro, which is their trade program, and I had been approved. So I was shopping with my Article Pro account and my Pro discount, feeling pretty good about the price. I built my cart, checked out, and paid for everything. Done, right? Then I had a nagging thought. Let me just check what this same order would cost through Minoan. So I rebuilt the cart inside Minoan and looked at the total. The difference was four hundred dollars. On the same furniture. Even with my approved Article Pro discount, going through Minoan was four hundred dollars cheaper. So I did the slightly annoying but very worth it thing. I canceled the order I had just placed with Article, got my refund, and reordered the exact same pieces through Minoan. Four hundred dollars back in the project budget for about fifteen minutes of work. That is the kind of hourly rate I will take all day. The lesson there is simple. Even if you already have a trade account somewhere, check Minoan before you hit pay. I assumed my Pro account was the best price available. It was not. ## The design firm mistake that Minoan quietly fixed Now here is the story I did not expect to be telling, because it has nothing to do with discounts and everything to do with customer service. For this project we hired a design firm. Smart move on paper. They spec the furniture, they handle the look, you stay out of the weeds. The catch is that a designer can only design as well as their measurements, and on this project a lot of the pieces they specced simply did not fit the dimensions of the space. Sofas too deep for the room. A dining setup that crowded the walkway. Pieces that looked perfect in the rendering and wrong in real life. Normally this is a nightmare. Furniture return windows are short, restocking fees are brutal, and once you are past the window you are just eating the cost and trying to resell things on Facebook Marketplace. Here is where buying through Minoan paid off in a way I never planned for. Because the orders went through Minoan, they came with Minoan's customer service policy, which gave us a longer refund window than we would have had ordering direct. When the dimension problems showed up, Minoan's team handled the returns for us. Not "here is a form, good luck." They legitimately took care of it. They sat between us and the brands and sorted it out. That saved us from being stuck with thousands of dollars of furniture that did not fit. I went in for the discounts. The support team is what actually rescued the project. ## A quick before and after Let me put rough numbers on it, because that is what we do around here. On the Article order alone, going through Minoan instead of my own approved Article Pro account saved four hundred dollars. Across the full furnishing of the rental, stacking trade discounts at Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main through one cart, the savings ran into the thousands. And the design firm's dimension mistake, which could easily have cost us several thousand in furniture we could not use, got handled through Minoan's longer refund window at no extra cost to us. Add it up and the free membership saved us more than the entire project was over budget. The thing that cost nothing to join is the thing that kept the numbers from getting away from us. ## Who this actually makes sense for I am not going to pretend Minoan is magic for every single purchase. If you are buying one lamp, it is not going to change your life. Where it earns its keep is exactly the situation a short-term rental investor is in: furnishing a whole property at once, across many brands, where small percentages on big totals turn into real dollars. So this is for you if: You are furnishing a short-term rental or a midterm rental from close to empty. You are buying across multiple brands and want one cart instead of ten logins. You want contract-grade pieces that survive guests, which the bigger brands carry. You would like a support team in your corner when something inevitably goes sideways with an order. That last one is underrated. With a rental, something always goes sideways. A piece arrives damaged, a delivery gets split, a dimension is wrong. Having Minoan's customer service handle that instead of you chasing three different brands is worth a lot on its own. ## How to get started The whole thing is low risk because it costs nothing to try. You sign up for Minoan, you get access to the brand discounts, and you build your cart. Before you check out anywhere else, including on a trade account you already have, compare the Minoan price. That one habit is what saved us four hundred dollars in a single sitting. If you are deeper into the operations side of running a rental, furnishing is just one line on a long list. We get into the rest of it, the financing, the tax side, the systems that let you run these from anywhere, over in [the newsletter](https://addictedtoroi.com/newsletter/) and inside the [ROI Inner Circle](https://apply.addictedtoroi.com/). And if you want the tax angle specifically, how short-term rental losses can offset other income, [The STR Loophole Explained](/blog/the-str-loophole-explained/) walks through it, and [STR Hours](https://strhours.com) is the app I use to track the material-participation hours that loophole depends on. ## A few questions I get asked about this ### Is Minoan really free? Yes. There is no membership fee to sign up or use it. The discounts come from the brand side, so you are not paying for access. ### Will it beat the trade account I already have? It might, and that is exactly why you should check. I had an approved Article Pro account and Minoan still came in four hundred dollars cheaper on one order. Compare before you pay. ### What brands can I shop? Hundreds of them. The ones we leaned on were Wayfair, Article, Samsung, and Joss & Main, but the catalog goes much wider across furniture, electronics, and decor. ### What happens if something needs to be returned? You go through Minoan's customer service rather than chasing each brand yourself. In our case their longer refund window saved us when a design firm specced furniture that did not fit, and they handled the returns for us. * * * _This is our own experience furnishing our short-term rentals, shared because it genuinely saved us money. Prices, discounts, and return policies change, so confirm the current details when you sign up. Not financial advice._ Addicted to ROI is education and community, not financial or tax advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making investment or tax decisions. ![Jennifer Beadles](/images/founders.jpg) Jennifer Beadles Real estate entrepreneur with 17 years of hands-on investing experience. Built an 8-figure rental portfolio across multiple states and has helped thousands of investors build passive income through the Addicted to ROI community. The tool that goes with this ## The software that does this for you [ Virtual staging RentStager Upload a photo of an empty room and get back furnished, listing-ready staging in minutes, for a fraction of physical staging, so vacant units lease faster. Stage a unit ↗ ](https://rentstager.com)[ STR test STR Loophole Track the 100-hour and material-participation tests for each short-term rental so the loophole that offsets your active income actually survives an audit. Track my STR hours ↗ ](https://strhours.com) Before you close the tab ## Get the next one in your inbox. One email per new article, the day it goes up. No wall, no spam, unsubscribe in a click. [Subscribe, free →](/newsletter/)[Run a deal in the calculator](/tools/deal-analysis-calculator/) Read next [ ![The Tech Stack I Use to Build-to-Rent (NotebookLM, Rayon, and a 17-Bid System)](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1519389950473-47ba0277781c?w=800&q=80) Business ### The Tech Stack I Use to Build-to-Rent (NotebookLM, Rayon, and a 17-Bid System) 8 min read → ](/blog/build-to-rent-tech-stack/)[ ![How We Split Roles Investing as a Couple (So One Spouse Isn't Doing It All)](/images/founders.jpg) Optimize ### How We Split Roles Investing as a Couple (So One Spouse Isn't Doing It All) 8 min read → ](/blog/couples-real-estate-roles/)[ ![How We Furnished Timber & Tide and Saved Over $13,000 Without Sacrificing Style](/images/portfolio-timbertide-living.jpg) Optimize ### How We Furnished Timber & Tide and Saved Over $13,000 Without Sacrificing Style 9 min read → ](/blog/furnishing-timber-tide-saved-13000/) If you like this ## Read these next Hand-picked to go deeper on business. 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