Shared from the 3/10/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

REAL ESTATE

Short-term rentals near Med Center in demand

Influx of out-of-town patients from both U.S., foreign countries props up budding industry to provide housing

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Photos by Steve Gonzales / Staff photographer

Jack Yang and Sally Huang from Shenzhen, China, shop with help from Wei Wu, right, of the U.S.-China Medical Exchange.

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Yang came to Houston for lung cancer treatment at MD Anderson, but he had trouble getting a short-term lease.

When Jack Yang received his diagnosis of lung cancer in a hospital in Shenzhen, China, he knew a hard path lay ahead.

Only 17 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer live for five years, according to MD Anderson, where Yang ultimately went through surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy. He and his wife, Sally Huang, left their jobs at a motor manufacturing plant to travel to Houston and fight for Yang’s life.

What they did not expect was to face countless obstacles entirely unrelated to health care. Shortly after arriving in Houston last June for intensive treatment, Yang found himself outside in the inhospitable Texas heat, hunting for a short-term rental on foot because he does not have a United States driver’s license.

He described the process of finding a place to live using a Chinese aphorism, “dahai lao zhen.” It was like fishing for a needle in the ocean.

While his timetable to recovery was uncertain, most places required six- or 12-month leases and would not allow him to sublet if his treatment ended sooner; his foreign bank account made it difficult to start utilities, which often check customer’s credit scores; and furnishing a temporary home without a car was both difficult and expensive.

“We need to do this all by ourselves,” he said through a translator. “You don’t know where to start.”

Yang is far from the only patient facing such difficulties. The Texas Medical Center served 18,000 international patients in 2010, the most recent year for which data have been released. That total has likely grown since, as the number of patients the center serves ayear has increased to 10 million from 6 million. International and out-of-town patients come with their own special considerations, including the need for accommodations for patients and caregivers who may not have transportation or know how long treatment will take.

Most hospitals have offices focused on meeting those needs. MD Anderson, for example, has a team of 10 representatives fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, French and Arabic fielding thousands of prospective patient calls a month and greeting families in person as they arrive in Houston. The team answers questions such as whether children can sign up for school during their parents’ treatments, and sends out emails filled with resources, including a list of 18 extended-stay hotels and furnished apartments compiled by Joe’s House, a nonprofit that provides lodging guides for cancer patients.

But Kent Postma, vice president of ambulatory operations at the hospital, said demand for such housing far outstrips supply.

“It’s almost easier to get into MD Anderson than it is to get into a long-stay living arrangement,” Postma said. “That person that’s coming from West San Antonio who needs to stay here for three nights or three months is competing for that same finite resource as that person from Shanghai or Mexico City.” Rising need

As a result, furnished short-term rentals near the Texas Medical Center are in high demand, according to real estate agents and the short-term rental giant Airbnb.

“A short-term rental sometimes will be like $5,000 (a month) in a high-rise building for a two-bedroom apartment,” real estate agent Shirley Qing said of the market near the Texas Medical Center. Average rent in the neighborhood, according to the Houston Association of Realtors, is $2,357.

Qing said it’s not uncommon for investors to rent blocks of apartments in multifamily properties near the medical center at a discount, furnish them and short-term rentals. Vacasa, a company that contracts with property managers to turn units into short-term rentals, has six units in Latitude Med Center Apartments, a new 35-story high rise within walking distance of the Medical Center’s hospitals. The furnished short-term rentals start at $157 a night, or roughly $4,700 a month.

The Latitude Med Center Apartments developer, Greystar, originally planned to let third-parties such as Vacasa convert 10 percent of its units into furnished short-term rentals.

“We quickly increased that number to 40 percent,” Senior Community Manager Kristin Krohn said. “The demand is definitely there. We see it on a daily basis.” Several of the building’s services — including an on-call shuttle and room service with a menu of healthy foods — target the needs of people traveling for treatment.

Elizabeth Tur, an Airbnb host, was similarly surprised by the need for housing when she listed a unit at Kirby Place Apartments, a 15-minute bus-ride from the Texas Medical Center, and it was instantly booked for months in advance. “The demand is huge,” she said. “Now we have eight units in Kirby, and we’re full all the time.”

Laura Spanjian, Airbnb’s senior public policy director for the Western U.S., said that the company looks for, and encourages, unusual activity such as Tur’s, who went from listing one unit to eight units, part of an unusual spike in listings in a concentrated geographic area. For example, when Super Bowl LI was held at NRG Stadium in 2017 it caused a surge in the number of people listing their properties, a trend Airbnb worked to boost through digital advertising campaigns targeted at recruiting more hosts in the area.

Airbnb plans to amplify the organic growth around the Medical Center by organizing informational events and reaching out to people who may have listed nearby properties for the Super Bowl without knowing that there was year-round demand.

“Now that we’ve seen the trends occurring naturally, we want to look at ways that as a company we can facilitate more options,” Spanjian said. “For the people traveling for treatment, their loved ones, their friends.”

And some hope to help not only with housing needs, but also with the other needs involved with life in a foreign place.

Settling in

Sandra Mitro, a Houston resident, said after her husband was diagnosed with cancer, they began meeting patient families from around the world looking for help settling into Houston. One such family was that of Christine and Daniel Devaux from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, who ended up in a furnished short-term rental that offered regular shuttles to the Medical Center and Target for $5,800 a month.

But challenges and expenses extended beyond a place to stay. It was difficult to communicate with family back home in areas without Wi-Fi, causing distress as Daniel underwent treatment and surgery. And when they left the hospital, there were not many quick, healthy food options nearby for weary patients and their families.

“If you could get a welcome package with all of these things — communication, transportation, shopping, groceries — it would be such a help,” Christine said. They ended up purchasing a U.S. phone and renting a car.

Mitro, who speaks both English and Spanish, now plans to lease an apartment she would make available through Airbnb that offers such information and provides all of the amenities she valued as a caretaker — from hand sanitizer and gloves for dealing with catheters to good water pressure and hot tea for unwinding after a long day.

A number of flexible housing options for patients have been started by caregivers who learned of the need through experience. One, the nonprofit Aishel House, is associated with the Chabad movement of Orthodox Judaism. It hosts patients in its 27 furnished apartments on University Boulevard, asking only that they pay what they can. Founded in 1992 by Rabbi Lazer Lazaroff and his wife, Rochel, who had a baby requiring intensive care, it is staffed by volunteers and provides hot kosher meals daily and drives patients to and from appointments and errands.

Another MD Anderson patient’s caregiver, Yi Zhang, is starting his own business in Hunan, China.

Like Yang, Zhang had searched for a short-term rental by foot; once he found one, the apartment would not accept rent by credit card or cash, so every month, he withdrew $1,800 from the ATM, then walked to Kroger and exchanged it for a cashier’s check. He had to find specialists who could translate Chinese medical documents into something American doctors could understand, then produce records of his treatment that could satisfy his insurance company back in China.

“Besides your treatment, your life is in total chaos,” Zhang said through a translator. “I wished there was a way to make this process less painful … a one-stop shop that could help us with everything.”

Adding convenience

A number of one-stop shops already exist. Established middlemen such as Beijing-based Saint Lucia Consulting have staffs of visa counselors, translators and chauffeurs who will prepare paperwork, meet patients at the airport and drive them straight to a furnished rental. But such services, which are offered in cities around the country, run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Zhang’s company, Union Reborn, is targeting a less wealthy market in his hometown of Hunan. He has assembled a team of travel agents and doctors to provide phone consultations on how to prepare for health care abroad.

Union Reborn began giving phone consultations in January. Once patients arrive in America, the U.S.-China Center for Medical Exchange, a nonprofit founded to help doctors from the U.S. study in China and vice versa, will help answer questions and connect patients with apartments, translation services and Mandarin-speaking cab drivers.

“In the process, I’ve learned of this need,” said Wei Wu, the executive director of the U.S.-China Center for Medical Exchange.

She had become friends with Yang and Huang when Yang was going through chemotherapy, and their friendship provided an example of the services U.S.-China Center for Medical Exchange plans to facilitate on a larger scale.

On a recent Monday, she met the family, who had flown back to Houston for a checkup. The visit with the doctor resulted in bad news for Yang, who needed to extend his stay here.

Wu drove them to the Great Wall Supermarket in Chinatown, and they chatted in Mandarin about familiar foods, such as sweet rice and celtuce, as she helped push their shopping cart beneath a ceiling hung with red lanterns.

Wu’s presence provided not only access to the comforts of home, but also the freedom to take advantage of the many choices Houston offers. When it came to eggs, the family decided they’d prefer organic. “We’ll go to the American grocery store for that,” Wu said.

They did, then drove back to their temporary home, a room in the home of a fellow patient, which they had arranged in advance. rebecca.schuetz@chron.com twitter.com/raschuetz

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