What flooring should you put in a Florida rental?
What a rental floor costs per turn rather than per foot, and the math landlords and STR owners should be running.
Landlords ask a different question from homeowners. A homeowner asks what it costs. An investor asks what it costs per turn, and once you run that number, the flooring decision stops being close.
The arithmetic that ends the carpet conversation
Take an 1,100 square foot rental in Tampa or Lakeland.
Carpet route. Mid-grade carpet with pad, installed, runs roughly $2.75 to $3.75 a square foot in this market, call it $3,300 all in. Florida rental carpet gets replaced every two to four years because of tenants, pets, humidity and sand. Over twelve years that is three or four replacements, so $10,000 to $13,000, plus a unit sitting empty for a few days each time.
LVP route. Our 20 mil waterproof plank at $1.79 with a 10% waste allowance is about $2,166 in material. Add installation at $1.75 a foot and you are around $4,100 all in. A 20 mil wear layer in a residential rental routinely goes eight to twelve years without replacement.
Roughly $4,100 once, against $10,000-plus in stages. The LVP unit photographs better, rents faster, and does not carry the smell that ends a security-deposit dispute in the tenant’s favor.
Why waterproof specifically, in Florida
Rental water events are not hypothetical. Supply lines fail, ice makers leak, tenants overflow tubs, and a unit can sit wet for days before anyone reports it. That is the scenario that destroys laminate, a wood-based core swells at every seam and the whole floor is scrap.
A rigid SPC core has no wood in it. It gets wet, it gets dried, and it is still flat. For a landlord that is the difference between a mop and an insurance claim. See LVP vs laminate for the full comparison.
Specification for rentals
Wear layer: 20 mil. This is the one place not to economize. Twelve mil is a residential spec built around one household that owns the property and treats it accordingly. Rentals do not get that.
Color: mid-tone, medium variation. Very dark floors show every crumb, every dust bunny and every footprint, which means turnover photos look worse and cleaners take longer. Very light floors show scuffing. A mid-tone oak with visible graining hides the daily reality of a rented house better than anything else. Our Natural Oak is the lot most of our landlords buy for exactly this reason.
Attached pad. Every plank we carry has one. It means no separate underlayment to buy, one less thing for an installer to get wrong, and quieter floors in upstairs units, which matters if you own the building below.
Plank size: match the unit. A nine-inch-wide plank looks superb in an open-plan living space and is wasteful in a narrow galley kitchen or a hall, where it gets ripped down its length on both sides. For small units, our 7.5-inch lots waste less.
Buy the whole portfolio at once
It costs us nothing to give investors this advice, because it means selling more at once instead of less.
Warehouse flooring is bought in lots. When a lot is gone it is gone, and the next container of “the same” color will not match. If you own six units, buy enough of one color to do all six, plus a few spare cases. Then:
- One trip and one price for the whole lot
- Leftover cases from unit three repair a water event in unit five
- No scrambling to match a discontinued color when a tenant leaves early
- Every unit photographs consistently, which matters more than people think when a portfolio is listed together
Call us about pallet quantities before you come. That is where our pricing is sharpest and it is not something we put on the website, because it depends on what is on the floor that week.
More for trade buyers on the wholesale and contractor page.
Short-term rentals are a different animal
If your property is near the parks (Davenport, ChampionsGate, Four Corners, Kissimmee), the traffic profile is not residential. Fifty-plus turnovers a year, rolling suitcases, and guests who are on holiday and behaving like it.
Specify up. Twenty-eight mil is the wear layer that survives it, and management companies increasingly write it into their standards. The upgrade from 20 to 28 mil on a 1,600 square foot vacation home is roughly $1,760, against a floor that would otherwise be replaced years earlier during peak booking season.
We serve the whole Orlando metro and Polk County corridor from the Tampa warehouse. For multi-unit work, text us the total square footage and we will tell you what we can put together before you make the drive.
Common questions
- What is the best flooring for a rental property in Florida?
- Waterproof luxury vinyl plank with a 20 mil wear layer. It survives tenants far longer than carpet, cleans rather than stains, is not damaged by the water events that ruin laminate, and costs about the same per square foot as mid-grade carpet with pad once installed.
- How long does LVP last in a rental?
- A 20 mil wear layer in a residential rental typically goes through several tenancies without replacement, commonly eight to twelve years, compared with carpet that many Florida landlords replace every two to four years.
- Should I use the same flooring in every unit?
- Yes, if you own more than two. A single color across a portfolio means leftover cases from one unit finish a repair in another, one purchase covers several turns, and you never have to match a discontinued lot under time pressure.
- Is vinyl plank good for short-term rentals?
- It is the standard for a reason, but specify up. Short-term rentals near Orlando see rolling-suitcase traffic that a family home never does, so 28 mil is a defensible upgrade where 20 mil would be plenty in a long-term rental.
