If you're accountable for a diversity spend number, you already know the hard part isn't commitment. It's finding categories where certified suppliers actually exist at the scale you need.
Some categories are easy. Office supplies, staffing, facilities services, marketing — the certified supplier base is deep, and most programs have worked those categories hard for years. Which is exactly the problem. The obvious categories are already optimized, and the goal keeps moving.
So the useful question isn't how do we spend more with certified suppliers. It's where is there significant spend we've never looked at through a supplier lens.
Extended-stay housing is usually one of them.
Housing spend rarely sits in strategic sourcing. It's scattered — some in travel, some in relocation, some inside project budgets owned by operations, and a chunk of it on individual expense reports that never got categorized as procurement at all.
When spend is fragmented across four budget owners, nobody sees the total. And what nobody sees, nobody sources strategically.
But the total is often substantial. A company running 40 people through 90-day assignments in a year is spending real money — recurring, predictable, and contracted. That's exactly the profile of spend a diversity program wants: not a one-time purchase, but an ongoing category that produces a number every quarter.
The distinction determines whether housing spend counts fully or barely at all.
Tier 1 is what you spend directly with a certified supplier. Contract $500,000 of housing with a certified provider, and that's $500,000 of Tier 1 diverse spend.
Tier 2 is what your non-diverse prime suppliers spend with certified businesses in their own supply chain. You report a portion of it — but only if the prime tracks it and reports accurately to you, which is where most Tier 2 data quality problems come from.
Tier 1 is cleaner, easier to substantiate in an audit, and counts at full value.
So the practical difference: if your extended-stay housing runs through a hotel chain or a non-certified provider, the best available outcome is a Tier 2 allocation. If it runs through a certified provider, the full contracted amount is Tier 1 spend.
Same travelers. Same policy. Same service level. Different classification.
The opportunity size depends less on company size than on how much extended-stay activity the business generates. A few patterns:
Manufacturing and engineering. Plant expansions, commissioning teams, and equipment installs put crews on site for months. This is often the single largest concentration of extended-stay spend in a company, and it's almost always buried in a capital project budget rather than a sourcing category. It's also the spend most likely to have never been RFP'd — the project team booked hotels because that's what was fast.
Financial services. Regulatory examination teams, systems integrations, and post-acquisition transition staffing all generate multi-month deployments. Financial services firms also tend to run mature supplier diversity programs with published targets, which means the reporting infrastructure already exists — this is a matter of routing existing spend into it.
Legal. Trial teams and document review deployments concentrate people in one city for weeks or months at a time, often with little notice. Firms working on behalf of corporate clients with their own diversity requirements have a second reason to care: your staffing choices can affect your client's reporting, and increasingly clients ask.
Consulting and professional services. Multi-month client engagements with rotating teams are the whole delivery model. Housing spend here is continuous rather than project-based, which makes it one of the easier categories to contract for annually and report on quarterly.
Technology. Data center builds, implementation teams, and intern cohorts each produce concentrated extended stays. Intern housing in particular is a clean case — it's planned months ahead, contracted in a block, and often already handled centrally, so the sourcing decision is easy to redirect.
Hospitality. Pre-opening teams, seasonal management staffing, and property transition crews generate exactly the kind of recurring extended-stay need that qualifies well as a Tier 1 category.
If your company holds federal contracts — as many manufacturers, defense suppliers, engineering firms, and large consultancies do — part of this isn't a voluntary program at all.
Federal contracts above $750,000 require the prime contractor to file a small business subcontracting plan under FAR Subpart 19.7, with goals for spend with small disadvantaged, women-owned, HUBZone, and veteran-owned businesses. The statutory targets include 5% of subcontract dollars to women-owned small businesses. Missing those goals carries real consequences, including damages and negative past-performance ratings that affect future awards. New York, California, Illinois, and Texas run comparable requirements on state contracts.
If that applies to you, extended-stay housing on a contracted project is subcontract spend, and where it's routed determines whether it counts toward a goal you're already obligated to meet. If it doesn't apply to you, skip this section — everything above still holds.
Most corporate housing providers don't own the buildings. They source apartments from property owners who, in most cases, aren't certified diverse businesses. So a fair challenge is whether a certified provider is simply a pass-through for ordinary spend.
Ask it of anyone, including us. The test is value added — what the provider does beyond passing along an invoice. In corporate housing, that means sourcing and negotiating in markets where inventory is tight, physically vetting properties against security and quality standards, holding and managing the leases so liability doesn't land on your company or your traveler, furnishing units, running 24/7 support, consolidating billing, and reporting spend and utilization.
A provider doing all of that is performing a service. A provider handing you a marked-up apartment listing is not — and no certification fixes that.
Certification is a qualifier, not a reason to buy.
If a provider can't place your people where the work is, can't hold quality across markets, or can't support a traveler at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, the diverse spend credit doesn't offset a failed assignment. Programs that treat certification as the primary selection criterion tend to produce exactly the outcome critics predict — and they make it harder for the next certified supplier to be taken seriously.
Qualify on capability, price, and service first. Then, among providers who clear that bar, certification is a legitimate tiebreaker that also happens to move a number you're already accountable for.
That's not a compromise. It's just procurement.
Switchplace is a WBENC-certified woman-owned business, woman-owned and self-funded since 1998, providing furnished extended-stay housing for Fortune 500 and international teams across manufacturing, legal, consulting, hospitality, and corporate mobility. We hold the leases, we're SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, and we can report spend in whatever format your program requires.
If housing is a category you haven't examined through a supplier lens, we'll walk you through the questions above — including the uncomfortable one.
Talk to our team →