As you get ready to advertise a residential rental listing, you’re probably wondering what you can do to get the most value from your investment. After all, advertising can sometimes feel like paying taxes: it’s money you have to spend, but you can’t always see the benefit.
Attract Prospective Renters: Learn How to Advertise Your Rental Property
With the technology that’s available today, you absolutely can -- and should -- know exactly where your rental listings are being advertised and how many high quality leads you’re getting from each one. That data is what you’ll use to calculate your return on investment and have the confidence that what you’re doing is working. Gone are the days of posting your ad in the classifieds and hoping the right person sees it.
First, Get Strategic About Rental Advertising
When you’re ready to advertise your rental property, you need to be strategic. The best way to ensure that is by using technology. Tenant lead software can go a very long way toward making sure you get the most from your rental ad.
These are some of the most important tech features to step up your advertising game:
- Syndication feed: this lets you automatically distribute the same rental listing to multiple online listing sites without needing to manually retype or copy/paste the data. You’ll save time and reduce the risk of errors.
- Syndication control: make sure that your tenant lead software lets you control which listings are syndicated over which channels.
- Ad reporting: this lets you pull in performance data from integrated advertising channels, such as Zillow, so you’ll always know which ones are getting the best quality tenant leads and delivering the highest ROI.
- Listing watermarks: hijacked listings are a serious problem, and it’s important to protect your listings from being stolen by scammers. One way to prevent this is to look for a software that automatically adds watermarks to your listings and then scans for any indicators of possible hijackings.
- Automated responses: once your ad generates an inquiry, don’t let it go cold! You’re 40% more likely to connect with a lead if you respond to them within just one to two minutes, and the only way to do that consistently is by using automation.
The next step is deciding where you should advertise your rental property. You should consider using a combination of online listing sites, social media and your local or regional MLS (multiple listings service).
Online Listing Sites
An online listing site offers prospective tenants an easy, customizable way to quickly find the vacancies that are perfect for them. If you aren’t listing your rental property on these sites, you are going to miss out on most of the rental market. The top rental listing sites include Zillow, Trulia and HotPads, among others. This article from Buildium & Tenant Turner takes a look at the best online rental listing sites to consider.
Advertise Your Rental with Zillow
Zillow has a massive inventory of over 110 million homes and rental units and it attracts a very large audience, making it a key channel for your rental listings. And with the right tenant lead software integration, syndicating your listings to Zillow is a snap. For example, with Tenant Turner’s integration, your contact information automatically populates in those fields for future listings, saving you time.
While it was originally free, Zillow is now using a paid inclusion model. Their parent company, Zillow Group, also owns Trulia and HotPads. Read our knowledge base article for more on how we help our users make the most of syndicating their listings on Zillow.
Advertise Your Rental with Trulia
As part of the behemoth Zillow Group, Trulia offers neighborhood-specific search, which is a feature that Zillow doesn’t currently offer. Since Trulia is part of the Zillow family, if your tenant lead software offers integrations for listing syndication via Zillow, Trulia is included.
Advertise Your Rental with HotPads
Another of the Zillow Group brands, HotPads, delivered the industry’s first map-based search. It’s a popular choice for listing corporate relocation-friendly rental properties. Like Trulia, it’s part of the Zillow Rental Manager online listing syndication network, meaning that syndicating here is a breeze.
Social Media
Make sure you share your listings via social media to get the broadest reach. You should post your listings organically (for free) by sharing them as status updates to your network. But you can also reach a brand-new audience by running paid ads through Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. Be sure to get creative with your content. Include amazing photos and video tours (including live ones!). And while you’re at it, don’t forget about Facebook Marketplace.
Advertise Your Rental with Facebook Marketplace
This is a huge market, with over 800 million users each month, according to Buildium. With Facebook Marketplace, you can publish your listing for free within a certain mile radius. It leverages the Facebook algorithm to determine when and where to display listings, so it won’t be quite as straightforward as other online listing sites. With the right tenant lead software, you can automatically syndicate your listings here.
MLS: Multiple Listings Service
MLS was the very first listing service, founded in the late 1800s as an in-person marketplace. Today’s MLSs are regionalized databases of online listings that are managed by a cooperative of local real estate brokers. There are currently over 800 MLSs in existence.
Since there are so many separate listing organizations, each MLS functions a little differently. Tenant lead software should offer a few different options for integration approaches so that you can connect to your local MLS in the way that works best. Here’s a breakdown of how we approach MLS syndication.
Looking for even more ideas on how to market your rental property, including how to make your listing stand out from the crowd? Check out 13 Tips for Marketing Rental Properties to Fill Vacancies Quickly.
You’re Getting Leads: Now Streamline Property Management
Once you’ve put in the investment to advertise a residential rental listing, make sure you have the processes and support needed to manage those prospective tenants properly. Tenant lead software such as Tenant Turner can help you move seamlessly from lead generation to lead nurture, and all the way to a signed lease. Here are a few ways how:
- Tenant screening:
Enable simple, customizable and consistent pre-screening questions that are compliant with the Fair Housing Act; something that’s become even more critical with policy changes taking effect in 2021. - Automation:
Automate common tasks across your showing and leasing process, such as allowing prospective renters to schedule their own appointments via a tenant showing scheduler, and automatically sending applications after each showing. - Property management website integration:
Easily share data with popular property management tools such as Buildium and Rent Manager to make the entire process seamless.
Tenant Turner is helping our users get more from their advertising budget and find high quality leads to keep their vacancies rented. Our software lets you view all of your active rentals in an easy-to-use dashboard, so you have all the information you need at your fingertips. And we integrate with many more listing websites than mentioned in this post; view our full list of syndication partners, including Zumper and Apartment List.
Are you ready to become a rental property advertising master?
