In a master lease, a business signs the lease and its employees live in the unit. You have one tenant with a tax ID, one rent check, and a counterparty that stays on the hook from November through the following November whether or not anyone is sleeping there in May. The employer handles who gets which bedroom and what happens when someone quits in February.
That structure is ordinary in ski towns. Winter Park Resort has picked up master leases on roughly 400 units around the Fraser Valley over the years, subsidizing rent and running the housing internally, because seasonal staff can't sign the year-long leases most owners want. The Town of Winter Park built a whole program on the model: local businesses sign a 12-month lease with the owner and sublease to their own employees, and the town's stated reasoning for that structure is blunt: it lets the property owner hold the business responsible for damage instead of chasing four twenty-three-year-olds who have moved to Bend.
The trade is real, and so are the parts nobody mentions until the first turnover.
What changes when your tenant is a business
You are no longer renting to occupants. You are renting to an entity that will place occupants, and everything downstream shifts with it.
The employer becomes a sublandlord. It selects who lives there, sets house rules, collects rent (usually by payroll deduction), and handles the roommate conflicts. Your relationship is with the company: notices go to a person at the company, rent comes from the company, and if the crew wrecks the place, your claim is against the company's balance sheet rather than a security deposit that four seasonal workers scraped together.
The occupancy churns. A single unit might see three crews in eighteen months: winter staff, a summer crew, then next winter's hires. Each changeover is a move-out and a move-in that you didn't schedule and won't be present for unless your lease says you will be.
And the shoulder-season hole closes. April and May in Jackson, or the stretch between mud season and Fourth of July in Summit County, are when private landlords eat vacancy. Under a 12-month master lease, the employer eats it.
Who screens the occupants
The employer screens people as employees. That is a hiring process, not a tenant screen, and it answers a different question than the one you care about. Nobody runs a rental history check on a lift op.
So screen the party you're actually contracting with. How long has the business operated in town? How many seasons has it housed staff, and where? Who signs, and do they have authority to bind the entity? For a small operator, a four-truck outfitter or a restaurant with one location, a personal guarantee from an owner is a normal ask, and so is a larger deposit or a letter of credit in place of a residential-sized deposit.
Two things you should not do. Don't set your own occupant criteria and hand them to the employer to apply: your fair housing obligations follow the dwelling, and instructing a tenant to select or exclude people based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability is a violation with your name on it. And don't invent a headcount cap. Tie maximum occupancy to the applicable building and health code and to the unit's actual bedroom sizes, which is also the approach that keeps you out of trouble on rental occupancy limits for seasonal housing.
Requiring that occupants be employees of the tenant is a different matter, since employment status isn't a protected class under federal law, but state and local ordinances add classes federal law doesn't cover, so check yours before you write anything clever into the lease.
Damage, turnover, and the crew you'll never meet
Density plus turnover equals wear. Four to six people cycling through a two-bedroom will put more miles on the carpet, the range, and the washer than a couple with a dog. Price that in rather than fighting about it in April.
The mechanism that actually works is inspection at every changeover, written into the lease. Name the standard, name who pays for cleaning between crews, and name a walk-through at each occupant transition rather than only at the end of the term. If you're leaving furniture, take a photographed inventory and attach it as an exhibit. Furnished staff housing without an inventory schedule is a dispute waiting for a date.
Deposit rules deserve a real answer rather than an assumption. State security-deposit statutes are written for residential tenancies, and whether they govern a lease to a business entity whose employees occupy the dwelling is genuinely fact-dependent. It turns on how your state defines a residential tenancy and how courts there treat occupancy by non-signers. Ask a local landlord-tenant attorney before you rely on a deposit structure that a residential statute would prohibit. In Colorado, for example, the 2026 amendments to the security deposit statute added walk-through rights, documentation deadlines, and a bad-faith presumption at 125% of actual damages; if your arrangement is treated as residential, those apply to you.
The obligations that don't transfer
Habitability doesn't move to the employer because the employer signed. The heat, the water, the roof, and the smoke detectors are still yours, and a tenant's promise to handle repairs doesn't extinguish a duty your state imposes by statute.
California landlords have a specific one to check. The state's Employee Housing Act reaches living quarters provided in connection with any work, whether or not rent is involved, when five or more employees are housed. That triggers a permit to operate and annual inspection through HCD or a local enforcement agency. A Truckee or South Lake Tahoe owner renting a five-bedroom to a restaurant group is close enough to that line to need an answer before signing, not after.
Colorado owners get a wrinkle in the other direction. The 2024 for-cause eviction law, at C.R.S. 38-12-1301 et seq., limits a landlord's ability to decline to renew, but employer-provided housing is one of the enumerated exemptions, along with tenancies under 12 months. Whether your specific structure lands inside that exemption is a question for counsel, and it's worth asking before you assume the master lease simply ends when the term does.
Also check the boring layer: local land use rules, short-term rental licensing, HOA covenants, and any deed restriction on the unit. Deed-restricted workforce units usually carry their own occupancy and eligibility conditions that a master lease can violate without anyone noticing until renewal.
Insurance, and the call to make first
Landlord policies are underwritten around a set of named residential tenants. A lease to a corporate entity, with rotating occupants who never signed anything of yours, is a different risk picture, and the time to learn how your carrier sees it is before signing rather than after a kitchen fire.
Ask specifically about a business-entity lease, about subletting to employees, and about whether occupants who aren't named on your lease affect coverage. Then push the risk back where it belongs: a certificate of insurance from the employer, you named as additional insured, an indemnity clause covering the acts of occupants and guests, and a requirement that the employer either carry or require renters insurance for the people living there.
What the deal costs you
Employers negotiate hard on rent, and there's a federal reason for it. When an employer counts lodging toward wages under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the credit is capped at reasonable cost, and reasonable cost does not include a profit to the employer. A resort charging staff more than the housing costs it is creating a wage problem, so the employer's ceiling on what it can pay you is tied to what it can defensibly recover from paychecks.
Then there's concentration. One tenant means one point of failure, and in a resort economy that failure correlates with everything else: a thin snow year cuts headcount, and the business that seemed rock solid in October renegotiates in January. Four separate tenants who each lose a job is a staggered problem. One employer that cuts its housing program is a total vacancy.
Smaller items worth knowing. The business will likely ask for a W-9 and issue you a Form 1099-MISC reporting the rent it paid, because rent paid in the course of a trade or business is reportable. Talk to your accountant about how that lands on your return. And you'll have less visibility into who is actually in the unit than you're used to, which some owners find perfectly comfortable and others don't.
Master leasing suits an owner who wants predictable income and low involvement and can accept more wear and a single counterparty. It suits an absentee owner better than a hands-on one. If that sounds like your situation, the next document to get right is the lease itself, and the seasonal lease terms that actually matter mostly carry over.
When you're ready to find one, employers hiring in your town are the ones already looking. You can list your unit for seasonal housing on TurnSeasons and note that you'll consider a business lease, and the city pages will show you what the local market is paying this season.