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.

New Upcoming Features for Finding Renters, Buyers, and Tenants

It seems there is just not enough time in the day. We have a whole range of new features we are working on adding to FillMyProperty.com. We will be rolling these features out in the coming weeks a few at a time. Here is an overview of some of the features you will notice:

More Generalized Rental and For Sale ADS
Ability for you to define if you want detailed information on your external rental and for sale ads on external sites such as CraigList.org and Backpage.com. The feedback we have recieved that has prompted this comes from users who like to give this information over the phone or just recieve the phone calls. One user told us that they have a large network of properties that they are aware of that they can fill and a more generalized ad to is good for generating phone calls to make deals happen.

While this is a good strategy we have to walk a fine line here. Our own extensive testing has shown that if you are too vague in your ad this will actually reduce your response rate. We are testing what works best right now and intend on rolling this feature once we get nailed down what works the best to gaurantee great response rates.

Inclusion of Your website
We are adding a new field that will include your website, that way you can also generate traffic to your own site as well.

More Feeds
We are testing a few new feed locations, once these get finalized we will do a post on what those feeds are and how to fnd your property on those feeds.

User Marketing Management
This involves some of our property marketing system. We are adding ways for you to easily communicate and make us aware of marketing issues you see. Such as a ad that has gotten flagged or something in your external ad not working correctly.

Those are the new features you should see here in the next week. There are many more features that are on the whiteboard that are in testing stage and almost ready to go live. Check back here for the latest on all new features we are adding.

New Content and FAQ Additions

We will be adding new help content to the website in the next two weeks.

This new content will also include in depth explanation of our marketing system. This explanation will go into how our system is currently built and what changes we are making to it to get even better results. Expect the FAQ to include some answers to questions such as when are you external ads updated, how do you find your property on property feeds, and how often is your ad renewed on external sites such as craigslist.com and backpage.com.

Our system is in it's infancy and the new version with new feeds, new ad serving, and more web locations is just around the corner. Also in the works is some great exclusive partnerships that will result in even better traffic and results for properties on the FillMyProperty.com family of websites.

We will also be adding posts to our blog every few days to keep you abreast of new developments on our site and also property marketing issues. In addition to this we will be starting a weekly email with the latest advice and news about FillMyProperty.com.

So please check back in a few weeks for more insight and new features from FillMyProperty.com.

Welcome to FillMyProperty.com

Welcome to FillMyProperty.com