At a recent mobility conference in the US, I asked the same question in almost every conversation with corporate mobility leaders: who provides your temporary housing?
Most answered with a shrug and the name of their relocation management company (RMC).
"Our RMC handles that for us."
That answer stayed with me. These are organisations that scrutinise every vendor in their procurement stack. Yet temporary housing, where an employee and often their family will live for weeks or months, is frequently left entirely to a third party. Many have no say in the supply chain, no vetting process and no view of quality until something goes wrong.
In this blog, I look at why that happens, what it means for employers, and how mobility teams can take back the key decisions without cutting out their RMC or adding to their workload.
Relying on an RMC is often the right call. RMCs bring real value in coordination, compliance and scale, and handing complexity to a capable partner makes sense.
The issue isn't the RMC itself. It's that many organisations have handed over the decisions along with the work: which providers are used, what standards they meet and what a stay should cost.
Managed travel offers a useful comparison. In most corporate travel programmes, the company owns its supply strategy. Travel buyers negotiate directly with airlines, hotel groups and car rental providers. The travel management company (TMC) then loads those contracts and rates into the booking flow as the company's preferred programme.
In other words, the TMC executes the policy, but the corporate sets it.
Preferred hotel programmes are well established in business travel. Recent GBTA research found that 54% of organisations outsource some or all of their hotel RFP activities to travel management companies (TMCs). Even so, the sourcing strategy and preferred hotel programme remain the corporate’s to define, with the TMC or specialist partner managing part of the process.
Nobody sees this as a criticism of the TMC. The corporate brings its volume and priorities, the TMC brings the technology and service to deliver them, and both benefit. In global mobility, this approach is still far less common.
Some organisations are going a step further and managing accommodation for mobility and business travel together. Our white paper shares real-world insights from companies that have consolidated both.
There are understandable reasons temporary housing hasn't followed the same path:
None of these reasons are wrong. But together, they leave the corporate carrying the risk and reputational exposure of the stay without the visibility or control to manage it.
A long stay is not a hotel night. It's where an employee settles their family, works remotely, recovers from a long-haul move and forms their first impression of a new city. When the property disappoints, it's the employer's brand the employee remembers, not the provider's.
Housing also affects whether people agree to move at all. In Atlas's latest Corporate Relocation Survey, 46% of companies saw an increase in declined relocation offers in 2025, with concerns about housing at the new location among the most common reasons.
Duty of care is part of every relocation, and it doesn’t stop when an employee checks in. That’s harder to manage with limited visibility of where people are actually staying.
It matters most when something goes wrong. During a disruption, such as severe weather or a local emergency, the first questions are simple: where are our people, and are they safe? Without a clear view of who is staying where, those questions can take longer to answer than they should.
Without clear reporting on temporary housing spend, it’s hard to see whether bookings stay within budget and policy, or where costs are rising. That visibility is what lets mobility teams make informed decisions with their own budget.
The answer isn't to remove the RMC. It's to adopt the model that already works in travel: the corporate defines its preferred supply, and the RMC delivers it.
In practice, that means:
Your RMC then books within that programme on a client-directed basis, keeping the operational efficiency that made the relationship valuable in the first place.
The two examples below show how it works from each side of the relationship.
NEI Global Relocation, an RMC serving Fortune 500 clients, already had what a good RMC should: a network of trusted accommodation partners and a high-touch service culture.
What it didn't have was a single place to manage that network. Bookings ran through email and partner coordination, and the back-and-forth with clients and employees could slow things down to the point where good properties were lost before a decision was made. With no centralised view of inventory or partner performance, it was hard to see which partners were delivering.
Working alongside NEI's Assignment Executives, we co-designed AltoCore Fully Managed around that challenge. NEI's preferred partners were onboarded onto the platform with negotiated rates applied and clearly badged, so teams could find and prioritise trusted properties instantly. They could still reach a wider pool of more than 10 million vetted properties when a market needed it. Sourcing, booking, invoicing and reporting moved into one place.
NEI and its partners can also now see win rates, average daily rates and the reasons bookings are lost, which makes partner management measurable rather than anecdotal.
The lesson isn't about the software. An RMC with a well-managed preferred network is faster, more transparent and better placed to deliver on a client's programme.
A global investment management firm, headquartered in New York with more than 1,700 employees across major financial centres, came to us early in building a formal mobility programme. Until then, employees received a lump sum and arranged their own moves.
Temporary housing was the biggest pain point. Employees had to find good-quality accommodation in an unfamiliar city on their own, and the firm had no way of knowing where its people were staying, how those properties had been vetted or what would happen if something went wrong.
Rather than wait for a problem to force the issue, the firm's new Global Mobility Manager chose to make temporary housing a core, managed part of the policy, with consistent quality across every location, clear performance data and support for the firm's sustainability goals.
We worked on it together from the start:
In under a year, the programme has delivered:
This firm doesn't use an RMC, but nothing about its programme depends on that. The vetted supply, negotiated rates and quality standards all belong to the firm. They could be handed to an RMC tomorrow and booked on a client-directed basis, just as a TMC loads a corporate's preferred hotel programme.
These two stories start in very different places. In the first, an RMC brought structure to the partners it already trusted. In the second, a corporate built its own preferred programme, one that could slot straight into an RMC relationship.
Together, they point to a model the industry can work towards: the corporate owns the supply strategy, the RMC delivers it, and the supply chain is visible to both. When those three are aligned, risk comes down, rates improve, quality becomes consistent and employees have a better stay.
For many teams, temporary housing sits with the RMC not because nobody cares, but because there aren't enough hours in the day. Mobility teams are already managing policy, compliance, tax and a steady stream of exceptions. A supplier programme on top of that can feel like one job too many.
The answer depends on scale:
The return can be measured. Both programmes are running below budget: NEI's clients by 15% and the investment firm by 12%. NEI has also reduced request-to-quote time by 19%, and the investment firm reports 100% employee satisfaction.
A preferred programme doesn't need to cover every market on day one. Start with the few cities where most of your moves happen.
Nor does your team have to do all the work. A partner can carry the vetting, rate negotiation and reporting. The mobility team's role is to set the standards and make the decisions, not to manage every provider day to day.
Mobility leaders already manage almost every other part of the employee journey with care: the policy, the allowances, the destination support, the tax position. Temporary housing deserves the same attention, because it's often the part of the move employees feel most directly.
So here's the question I'd put to every mobility leader: you choose your immigration counsel and your tax advisors with care, so why not the provider behind the place your employees will call home?
Managing your temporary housing supply doesn't have to mean more work. It means taking back the decisions that matter, reducing risk, getting better value and giving your employees a stay you'd be proud to put your name to.