A lot of threads here this week come back to the same problem in different forms. A tenant skipped out, a deposit didn't cover the damage, a unit sat empty, or the cash flow came in thinner than the spreadsheet said. I've run long-term, mid-term and short-term rentals. For me, the biggest difference between the three isn't monthly rent vs. nightly rate. It's how often the unit turns over, and who pays for each turn.

Long-term: few turns, but the empty days add up.
I owned long-term rentals in Orlando for several years before I moved into mid-term and short-term. With a 12-month lease you might turn a unit once a year or less, and that's the big appeal. When it does turn, all of it is on you. My turns there usually cost under $1,000 in make-ready, which isn't bad. What hurt more was the time: it took over a week to get a unit back on the market, and that's a week with no rent coming in. People budget for the paint and repairs and forget to budget for the empty days. I suspect a lot of the "is cash flow really this hard" posts are really turnover posts.

Short-term: constant turns, but the guest pays for the clean.
STRs turn over all the time. That sounds like the worst of the three, but on my listings the cleaning fee is a pass-through: the guest pays it, and it covers the clean. So a normal turn isn't eating my margin. The abnormal turns are where the cost is. I had one guest leave the bedding in a condition where it couldn't be saved, and the sheets went straight in the trash. With that many turns, an occasional bad one is guaranteed, so I treat linen and supply replacement as a normal cost, not a surprise.

Mid-term: in between, and extensions make it better.
This is why most of my units now run as a mid-term/short-term hybrid. The calendar is set for 30+ day stays with 30–60 day minimums, and short stays only fill gaps of a few days to two weeks. That alone means far fewer turns than a straight STR. The other piece is keeping a 60-day window open after each mid-term stay so the guest can extend. One construction crew extended four times and stayed over 90 days. Every extension is a turn that never happened.

How I'd use this if you're weighing strategies

• Count turns per year, not just monthly income. Then put a real cost on each turn, including the empty days.

• Ask who pays for the turn. In an LTR it's you. In an STR the cleaning can be passed through to the guest. On my mid-term stays I do a mid-stay clean every 30 days and a deep clean at checkout. Both are built into the price, and the deep clean is built into the checkout turn time, so the calendar already blocks the days it takes.

• Look at what would keep stays long. If nothing near the property creates 1–3 month demand, an "MTR" will turn like an STR without the STR rates.

For those of you who've run more than one strategy: what does one turnover actually cost you, and has that changed which strategy you favor?