Help? I am lost in a sea of internet ads

[brentdavies]

How does a tenant find a rental property in the big wide sea that is now the Edmonton rental market.
10 years ago, we only had the Edmonton Journal, the Edmonton Sun, and the Home Renters Guide. No internet.
4 years ago, Rent Edmonton and Rentfaster were available, and were very good at attracting the tenant moving to town.
This spring, I cannot find the new out of province tenants.
Now there more than 25 public rental websites available for an owner like myself. I decided to test 9 sites this month.
The problem is which site works and gets results.

Here is a snapshot of Edmonton ads last week

Kijiji 7454 ads
Rent Edmonton 628 ads
Rentfaster 690 ads
Gottarent 107 ads
Viewit.ca 141 ads
Rentboard 444 ads
Hometrader.ca 710 ads
Criagslist 1210 ads
Edmontonsun.ca 53 ads

The Edmonton Journal Classified section was over 2 pages just 3 years ago. Today it is less than half a page. What a shift. Seems everyone has gone from the Journal to Kijiji.

Kijiji, with over 7400 ads, how do you stand out? The top of page 2 is only 2 hours old. 24 hours old ad is on page 12. Landlords must be busy rewriting their Kijiji ads every 2 hours to keep them fresh. Do Tenants look that far back in their search.

My internet guru, brags that if you are on page 2, your are dead. So Kijiji may be a bust for me, but time will tell. What is the current attraction to Kijiji? The cost if free $, but if you posting every day, is it free. What is your time worth?

Many sites allow the tenant to locate a place geographically, and price and size, but not Kijiji or Craigslist.

And I have not yet mentioned the topic " quality of tenant".

 

[jarrettvaughan]

QUOTE (brentdavies @ Apr 11 2009, 07:53 AM) My internet guru, brags that if you are on page 2, your are dead. So Kijiji may be a bust for me, but time will tell. What is the current attraction to Kijiji? The cost if free $, but if you posting every day, is it free. What is your time worth?

Many sites allow the tenant to locate a place geographically, and price and size, but not Kijiji or Craigslist.

It is important that you "top post" your ad every 3 days for craigslist. If you do it more often than that, the ad will be deleted. To do this, delete the ad, and click on re-post, re-upload the pictures and you are set to be at the top of the page for a while.

For Kijiji you have to delete the ad and create a new one as you can not re-post it, but you can do it everyday if you want.

Also, I try to post under a couple different cities. For example, for a house in Chilliwack, i would post it under Vancouver and under the Fraser Valley on craigslist. You will have to write 2 different ads as your ads would be deleted due to double posting.

Hope this helps getting more hits.

 

[ChrisDavies]

As one of the aforementioned Internet Gurus, part of the reason that page 2 is not good enough comes from research we`ve done at work. You can see some images and samples of our eyetracking research on search engines here, and the same principles apply to the rental search engines. I suspect people will go to the second page a little more often than they would with Google, but still, after the 2nd or 3rd page most people are on auto-pilot.

The more direct implication is that if the website you`re looking at doesn`t show up on the first couple pages of Google for something like "edmonton apartments for rent" the chances are your prospective tenants won`t ever see it!