Brace yourselves for more listing site shake ups
We all felt the splash when Zillow Group began charging for single family listings in 2019, and over the course of a year became a fully monetized platform. It was a tough pill to swallow for property managers who relied on Zillow, Trulia, and Hotpads as their primary source of free leads. Luckily, there was a hero waiting in the wings: Zumper to the rescue! Buttressed by their unique partnership with Facebook Marketplace, leads still flowed without paying for listings.
Zumper to begin charging
Now Zumper, who has historically re-syndicated to Padmapper and Facebook Marketplace, is following in the footsteps of big brother “Z,” and has announced that it will start charging for single family listings, too. But unlike Zillow Group, who did a state by state rollout, Zumper is going big bang and will stop accepting most listings from feeds on 10/1/21 unless customers have a paid agreement in place. We say most, because they are allowing up to 5 free listings at a time per company. Anything beyond that will require a paid agreement.
Source: Tenant Turner. Zumper % of total leads jump after partnership with Facebook is finalized in 2017.
Zumper & Facebook: The biggest breakup you won’t see on TMZ
Zumper was able to fill the lead void left by the Zillow Group in part because of their partnership with Facebook Marketplace. It’s no coincidence that Zumper and Facebook paired up in late 2017, and Zumper’s lead volume jumped through the roof in subsequent years. But perhaps the biggest shake up of all is the news that this partnership will no longer continue. Facebook very quietly decided to end all feed partnerships for rental listings -- directly impacting its relationship with Zumper, ApartmentList, and RentSync (in Canada).
Per Facebook, “On September 13, 2021, Marketplace will discontinue the distribution of vehicle, home rentals, and homes for sale listings from partner catalog feeds. Listings provided to Facebook via partner catalogs will not be displayed on Marketplace, including the homepage, category pages, browse experience, or in search results.”
That means that if you plan on paying for Zumper moving forward, that agreement will not include resyndication to Facebook Marketplace. In order to get your listings on the free and very effective Facebook Marketplace, you will have to manually create rental listings from your business page. With this move, they essentially have relegated themselves back to the cumbersome posting process used by Craigslist, with no feed support from any partner. If you use Tenant Turner, you can still put your Tenant Turner phone number and listing links in the description or route leads into your account from manual listings so we can respond to them on your behalf.
What happened?
Facebook has not issued a statement about why they cut ties with feed partners, but we believe rental scams are part of the reason. They can’t control listings from feed partners the same way they can control listings posted directly on their site. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the number of rental scams reported in 2020 was up 59% year over year, and early indicators suggest the trend is only going to continue this year. Maitri Johnson, Vice President of TransUnion’s Rental Screening Solutions recently shared, “What Covid has done is accelerated the rental industry’s adoption of technologies in the digital environment to become contactless. As this acceleration into the digital environment has occurred, it also has opened up the prevalence of fraud much more so.” So, Facebook could be taking a step to better control its content, but at an efficiency cost to the property management industry.
So what are you left to do?
You still need tenant leads for your rentals, and you may not have planned on increasing your marketing budget. With Tenant Turner, we can generate leads from more places than you can do on your own. If you plan to pay listings sites for expanded ad reach, our feed will post to those listing sites for you. With a simple on/off toggle, you say which rentals you want to post on paid sites, so you are in full control of your ad spend. Then, our reporting tools can track not just where your leads are coming from, but your leases too. We can’t control if and when more listing sites will move to a paid model, but by working with Tenant Turner, you’ll have the marketing power and insights to feel confident that your ad dollars are working for you.