Latest Property View Page Now Up & Redesign

One of the things that surprised us recently in launching FillMyProperty.com is the amount of residents who find our sites via the search engines. Most of our pages are not targeted in this way so we are a beefing up some features for potential residents who find us this way.

Soon a potential resident will be able to search for available properties on FillMyProperty.com as well as set up a profile. These will be very scaled down versions and will most likely direct potential residents to the particular website based on the property listing type to find more information.

Our first minor roll out is a new page on our site that lists the latest 25 added properties from around the country. You can view our latest added properties. We are also adding a new page for the most viewed properties as well.

The last new item we have is we are working on a complete redesign of FillMyProperty.com. This redesign is still in the early stages and we hope to have this launched by Dec 15th, 2008. This will include a much cleaner look as well as some new features we have been testing these last few month. We should mention in this release to is a new picture upload process that will auto re-size your pictures.

Any other feature you would like added or that you see in other sites that you use please feel free to comment. We would appreciate any feedback you have and would work hard to implement any feature you recommend.

New Picture Upload Page and Weekend Updates

We made some modifications to our picture upload page. We are now limiting the size of images to 200K as well as checking for valid file types. We also added a loading indicator and are working on having this information relay the exact progress on your upload as well.

We are currently testing an automatic picture resizer that should solve 99% off all problems when uploading pictures to our site. Almost all problems when uploading forms is due to large file size. This causes the connection to time out on most uploads of files over 500K.

This weekend we are releasing a minor update but will have a drastic change on your external advertising. We are adding a new entery item for properties called 'search cities'. You can use this field to input cities that are close to your property.

On most of our external marketing we include these cities but this is system generated and not always as accurate as we would like. Some regional areas simply have too many cities located within and cause our ads to get flagged or frustrations with users searching for properties.

This new input will be on the property details section of the site and expect to see this live by this Sunday, November 2nd, 2008.

Property Views Now Live

You are now able to see the amount of times your property has been viewed on our websites. We have been tracking views for the past few weeks while we have been testing this feature.

Your individual property views can be found on the control panel after you log in. This is right after the marketing link. Currently this shows the current views from today, click this link to get even more detailed information.

Currently your views are combined into one number we are working on breaking this number into even more meaningful information. Data such as what listing type and website the view came from, also how the user found your property, such as via a feature, search, advanced search or other location on our sites.

OOdle Rental Feeds Up and Running

Since we stopped working with a third party to provide our feeds we have been implementing these ourselves. On each site/marketing location we have a feed we will have three core feeds. Rental, Rent to Own, and Owner Financing.

Our latest feed to go live is our RENT OODLE.com Feed. You can view this feed at
OODLE Feed.

OODLE is a great service, and they have many places they feed to as well, such as Walmart.com. OODLE is actually the back end technology for the Walmart Classifieds.

We plan to launch the Rent to Own and Owner Financing Feeds later this week.

It should be noted for currently active properties you wont see this feed listed on your Property Marketing View but don't worry your property will be included in the feed. Any property activated after October 7th, 2008 will be able to see this feed on the property marketing view page.

Also we are not able to provide you a link directly to your property on the feed, we are only able to provide you a link to the overall feed.

How to Find Tenants and Renters with Craigslist.org

Putting your property on Craigslist.org is a one of the key steps to finding high qualified tenants, renters, and tenant buyers for your property. So what do you need to do to get maximum results and responses for your property for rent or rent to own?

Post Set Up

Decide if you want potential residents to pre-qualify themselves or you would rather field responses and phone calls and do this yourself. This will be the number one factor in how you design your post. If you want potential residents to pre-qualify themselves then you want to create a post with as much information and as much details as you possibly can.

If you would rather field emails and the phone calls with questions such as "do you accept section 8?", "how many bedrooms are upstairs?" and other hundred possible questions like this. If this is what you are looking for you want to create a post that is intentionally vague but gives enough information for someone to contact you. Many leasing agents and housing brokers use this technique if they have a large stable of available homes. Just remember don't be so vague that you do not give enough information on the property you are featuring.

Either way you decide to set up your post the following tips will apply.

Post as Often as Possible.

In most markets Craigs List only allows you to post your ad once every three days. Even if you delete your previous post you still have to wait three days. One thing to note is this '3 day time frame' is based on time as well. So if you posted a ad today at 8:30 am you can delete this post three days later and re-post at 8:30 AM. It should be noted there are ways around this 3 day time frame but are against the Craiglist.org TOS and will potentially upset users and after a while will get your posts flagged.

Include Pictures

Include at least 4 pictures. If you have a website include a link to your website where you have more photos. There have been many studies lately that try to figure out exactly what the magic number of pictures for a real estate listing. Most of the latest studies have found that the more pictures the better, although these same studies suggest that 10 is enough to get the phone to ring.

Make sure you pictures are quality pictures. Pictures taken from good angles as well as at least dimensions of 640x480 as this is recommended because 95% of all users will be able to view this.

Best Time/Day to Post

There are three core times to post all centered around how we live our modern lives. Before 8:30AM, 12:15PM, and 5:45PM.

What is the best day to post? We haven't found this to be a factor in all the marketing we do but some would argue that you want to post on Monday and Thursday. This actually works well because Monday not everybody starts the day ready for work so usually eyes are other places. Thursday many potential renters are planning their weekend around what homes they want to see.

Answer The Phone and Respond Immediately.

This should probably be at the top. In our local market where we started one of our keys to success was being on of the only few companies in town that answered the phone with a live person when a potential resident called. We will go into detail how to handle large volumes of calls in a following post but just answering or responding to an email immediately goes a long way to capturing good quality residents.

The key is to be consistent in your posting. With one or two properties this might be easy but add a few more and this becomes more of a task. Of course instead of doing all this yourself you could just enter your property here at FillMyProperty.com.

Here at FillMyProperty.com we have an internal system that tracks and manages all of the above. We also have an internal system set up just for tracking new strategies and new posting types. For us it comes down to responses rates and not view rates. Sure it is important how many people actually view your ad or property. What is even more important and fills your property is how many responses you had. I would take 1 response over 50 views on any property I was marketing.

Set Up a FillMyProperty.com Account and post your property for free!

Hotpads.com Feed Up and Running

Our hotpads.com property feed is up and running. We were relying on a third party to feed our listings and it wasn't quite working the way we wanted. So effective tonight your property will be fed along one of three property feeds. You will be able to view a link on your property in the control panel under the link titled 'view marketing'

Rent
Just straight rental feed. If your property is listed as just a rental property it will be included in this feed.

Rent to Own
Rent to own/Lease Option feed. This feed is for properties that are listed as rent to own. If your property is listed as a rental and a rent to own then your property will be included on this feed and not included on the rental feed.

For Sale/Owner Financing
For Sale Feed. Your owner financed listed properties will be on this feed.

So if you list a property for rent, rent to own, and owner financing your property will be included on two feeds. The Rent/Rent to Own feed is essentially the same except the rent to own feed contains more points about rent to own and leads the potential resident to these domains.

One more point is our feeds run in the early morning hours, so if you enter a prooperty today you should be able to view your property via the marketing page the following day.

This is the first of many feeds that we are now handling ourselves. We should have the bulk of all our feeds completed here in the next three weeks.

Craiglist.org and Backpage.com repost timeframe

We have been conducting some rather extensive tests to see what is the best amount of time between re-posts on both Craigslist.org and Backpage.com.

CraigList.org
Effectively immediately (well it started on Monday) we will be renewing all CraigList.org ads every three days. This is the minimum amount allowed by Craigs List. So for instance an Ad released on Monday will be renewed on Thursday. When we renew an ad we delete the existing and create a new ad in it's place.

BackPage.com
With Backpage.com we will be renewing the ad every 7 days in most markets. In more competitive markets where there are large number of postings our renew date will stagger between 4 - 7 days.

Hoobly.com
We will not be making any changes to Hoobly.com at this time.

Kiijii.com
We are having some difficulties in posting to Kiijii at this time. We are working on either a feed or some other way to post.

All other marketing is done by either our exclusive partnerships or property feeds. These feeds are updated on a nightly basis. It should also be noted that some feeds propogate out to other locations so if you deactivate a property give it 24 - 48 hours to be removed from all marketing sources.