Another property just emptied and you need to fill it fast. You have your go-to websites to advertise your rental properties, but no way to know how much they’re helping you to attract prospective tenants.
Could you get better results (and better tenants) from other rental websites? Are you getting the biggest bang for your buck from paid websites?
Tenant Turner has done the research for you. We researched the data from 2021 identified the best websites to advertise your rental property for 2022. Here’s a quick overview of the results — check out our 2022 report for more details.
Best Websites for Generating Tenant Leads
According to our research, Zillow Group (Zillow, Trulia, and HotPads) had a banner year, outperforming all other property listing websites — and not by a slim margin. Here are the stats.
Best tenant lead source
Zillow Group leads the pack as the source that generates the most leads (44.1%) and the source that generates the most leads that were eventually selected for a property (49.8%). Those numbers made Zillow Group the best ratio of quality-to-quantity. Zumper Group and CoStar Group took the next two spots.
Tenant leads over time
Zillow Group enjoyed a strong 2021, but what do the trends indicate for 2022? The biggest winner in the short term appears to be Zillow Group, but both CoStar Group and Realtor.com leapfrogged Zumper Group for lead source rankings in Q4 of 2021.
CoStar Group and Realtor.com appear to be trending up, and they could give Zillow Group a run for their money in 2022.
Zumper took a hit in 2021
Actually, Zumper took three hits in lead traffic. While they started the year in the #1 spot, they suffered several blows in the latter half of 2021 and ended up trailing the Zillow Group by more than 50 points.
First, there was a seasonal dip at the end of August. A couple weeks later, Facebook Marketplace stopped accepting feeds from Zumper (and everyone else), and the drop off was immediate and significant.
On October 1, 2021, Zumper began charging property managers to list rental properties on their site. While they didn’t seem to lose any lead traffic from that move, it didn’t help. Zumper’s lead traffic remained pretty flat for the rest of the year.
Related reading: How to Best Advertise Your Residential Rental Listing to Get More Tenant Leads
When Zillow Isn’t the Best Rental Advertising Website
Zillow Group outperforms the others, but Zillow is a paid website. Some property managers aren’t willing to pay for their listings. Others always choose a paid website like Zillow. Either way you go, that kind of all or nothing approach will hurt you in the long run — at some point, you’ll either pay for listings that don’t need Zillow, or you’ll lose money because you don’t have enough qualified tenant prospects.
Instead, we recommend a more nuanced and strategic approach. If you need the leads, don’t be afraid to pay. You can pass the cost on to your owners.
On the other hand, many rentals will get more than enough leads from the free sites. There’s no reason to list those properties on Zillow, even though Zillow may be considered “the site” to be listed on. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that prospective tenants will disregard any property that isn’t listed on Zillow.
If you have a $1200 per month condo in a popular neighborhood, you won’t need to pay for that listing. Plenty of people will find it on various free websites.
As more sites go to a paid model, Tenant Turner makes it easy to toggle back and forth between paid and free websites. Turn the option on or off on a listing-by-listing basis. With Tenant Turner, you aren’t locked into listing every rental property on a paid site, so you can dynamically reduce your overall marketing costs as needed.
Related: 11 Tips for Advertising Your Rental Listing on Zillow
Don’t Advertise on One Website Only
If you are hand selecting only two or three websites to advertise on, reconsider. Because Tenant Turner makes it just as easy to advertise on 100 sites as on one site, there’s usually no reason to keep your selection small.
When considering which sites to advertise on, perform a quick cost/benefit analysis. If the site is free to advertise on and Tenant Turner pushes your listing to that site, then great. Any new leads that come from that site are just icing on the cake.
If there’s a free site that has a very low likelihood of generating valuable leads and requires manual entry, then you're better off skipping that site. The last thing you need is another place to manually enter information, keep price and picture changes up to date, and have to remember when it's time to take that listing down manually.
Advertise on More Rental Websites with Less Effort
Tenant Turner helps you get your listings on more sites, with less effort. You don’t have to individually post through Zillow Rental Manager, or have a feed specifically over to Apartments.com, or manually enter into RentPath.
Instead, you can have one single listing that you set up in Tenant Turner (or import from your property management software). Tenant Turner then automatically syndicates it out to all of those rental websites for you. Eliminate all those additional steps and effort and take it off your plate in just a couple minutes.
We also eliminate the hassles of conforming to specific site requirements. Each website has its own set of rules and its own data format. Some of them have different API agreements or different update time periods. Tenant Turner takes care of all the little known issues for you so that everything works the way it should.
We’re also continually looking for new sites, so you don’t have to. Not only do we hit the popular sites like Zillow and Zumper, but we also partner with the up-and-comers like Dwellsy and ApartmentList.
With Tenant Turner, advertising your rental property is a snap. Discover more about the best websites to advertise your property — download our advertising guide today!
