Entries by Jeremy

We're pleased to announce the launch of TenantMarket.com!

TenantMarket helps landlords find their ideal tenant fast by flipping the rental market and allowing landlords to search, filter, and contact renters.

How does it work?

If you are familiar with Match.com, the idea is similar: renters share their housing search, landlords search their profiles and contact renters who match. It's free for renters, and landlords pay only to contact renters.

Who is it for?

We designed the service to help the Do-It-Yourself landlords who own and manage "small properties" (i.e. condos, houses, duplexes, and sub-10 unit apartments). According to the Census Bureau, that describes about 2/3 (or 24 million) of rental units (approximately double the size of the apartment industry).

How much does it cost?

Access to contact renters starts at $29.95 for 10 days, $39.95 for 20 days, and $74.95 for a Good-till-Filled subscription. All subscription levels are for use with a single vacancy. If you have two properties at different locations, or two units with different floorplans at the same location, each would require their own subscription. If you have multiple vacant units at the same location with the same floorplan and price, you can use one subscription for all.

Is anyone using it?

Yes! We already have subscribers from Rhode Island to Oregon, and we are expanding our sales and marketing efforts each day.

Does it violate Fair Housing?

No. TenantMarket.com does not ask renters to share any information regarding protected classes (such as race, religion, and family status), and the duty is the same for landlords and owners to not discriminate whether they are online or in person.

How many renters do you have?

Currently we have 79,000 profiles of active searching renters nationwide. But the real test is how many renters match your property—to find out, go to www.tenantmarket.com, enter your zip and rent price and find out.

Can property managers and realtors use it?

Yes! In fact, anyone with more than 5 vacancies is invited to contact our sales team at 1 (800) 601-8205 to request a quote for special pricing.

What are the benefits for renters?

The key benefit for renters is they can save their search criteria and find out about new rental listings that match their parameters instantly via email. This saves times and helps renters jump on available properties more quickly. Also, landlords can target personalized incentives to renters based on their profile, extending discounts to non-smoking renters or renters with a longer employment history.

Why did you create it?

We spent a lot of time talking to independent real estate investors and owners and learned a lot about the difficulties of marketing rental properties. The biggest problem they cited was the lack of transparency—you can spend $300 per month for a newspaper ad, another $100-$200 per month to list your property online, or pay 80% of a month's in realtor commission, all without knowing who (if anyone) will see your listing or how long your property with be vacant. We designed TenantMarket to be proactive. Instead of waiting for renters for find you, you can reach out to them. Not only does this shave days off vacancy, but also provides more control and transparency over the process of finding a renter.

The options for marketing rentals online have exploded in the past couple years. Since the big apartment listing sites like apartments.com and rent.com tend to list mainly large multi-family properties, we wanted to make a list of all the advertising options for the do-it-yourself landlord trying to rent houses, condos, and duplexes (with an emphasis on the free ones). To make life easier, we organized our list by type of site (Just Rentals, Real Estate, and General Classifieds), and then ordered them by traffic estimates from Quantcast, a web analytics firm. Hopefully you'll find this list helpful in deciding where and how to advertise your next vacancy. Just Rentals Site Est Montly Visitors Pricing RentClicks 500,000 $39-$99 Sublet.com 490,000 $45-$81 RentalHouses.com 440,000 $39-$79 HomeRentalAds.com 370,000 $35-$56 RentalHomesPlus 260,000 $49 CityLeases 170,000 See Sublet Rentals.com 170,000 See RentClicks HomeRentals.net 160,000 $49-$139 RentVine 140,000 $38-$64 Tenant.com 57,000 Free TenantPlus 42,000 Free ThatRentalSite 36,600 Free ForRentByOwner 23,000 Free HotPads 18,000 Free FindHomeRentals.com 16,000 Free ThisProperty.com 15,000 $50 RentMarketer 6,000 $39.95-$89.95 CityCribs.com 5,000 Free RentalSource 2,000 $9.95-$99.95 ApartmentFrog 1,500 $20 RentFinders.net 1,500 $9.95 RentGrazer 1,500 $9.99 MetroLeases.com 1,000 See Sublet RentSeek 1,000 $49.99 SimpleRent 1,000 Free Urents.com 1,000 Free RentKong 0 Variable commission     Real Estate Site Est Montly Visitors Pricing Move.com 4,400,000 Free Yahoo Real Estate 2,600,000 $34.95-$54.95 House.info 280,000 Free ChoiceofHomes 7,000 $9.95 FindMyRoof 2,000 Free AOLRealEstate 220,000 See Move.com     General Classifieds   Site Est Montly Visitors Pricing Craigslist 10,000,000 Free LiveDeal 2,100,000 Free Myspace Classifieds 2,100,000 Free Backpage 1,100,000 Free Oodle 880,000 Free Microsoft Live Expo 690,000 Free Adpost 250,000 Free Olx.com 180,000 Free Vast 170,000 Free Google Base 100,000 Free Geebo 66,000 Free Lycos.com 57,000 See Oodle Postlets 53,000 Free eDirection 41,000 Free Edgeio 21,000 Free Vflyer 15,000 Free eFind 7,000 See Oodle *Pricing estimates based on cost to place 30-day vacancy listing in Seattle, WA. ** Monthly visitor estimates by Quantcast.com as of 2/15/2007

Zillow made two announcements this week of interest to real estate investors. First, Zillow will host FSBO ads for free. The second, and more interesting feature is called, Make-Me-Move whereby owners can make a more limited advertisement that a property might be for sale, for the right price. Zillow’s Make-Me-Move service requires that you verify that you own your properties, and once that’s complete, you can indicate a price at which you would consider selling.

Clearly, lots of things can go wrong with the Make-Me-Move service: realtors can use the site to prospect potential sellers (simply because they listed a Make-Me-Move price). Owners could list Make-Me-Sell prices that are wildly beyond all reason, making the whole thing pointless. Owners could try to raise the price of their property once a buyer contacted them, wasting everyone's time.

That said, for real estate investors, if you have not already, bookmark Zillow because this is one more site in your toolbox. First, you may find it a useful as a way to prospect properties for acquisition. If an owner is willing to set a price, they may be open to a counter-offer (and you can negotiate directly with the owner). Second (and this is our recommendation), real estate investors can set Make-Me-Sell prices for their entire portfolio, giving them a way to gradually sell-off their properties without ever formally listing the property for sale.

Investors know that everything is for sale, for a price. Zillow offers a practical way for real estate investors to test the market. If the right buyer comes along, investors can take their profit and find the next great deal. Remember, selling is required if you want to see your return, but you make your profit when you buy. So think of Make-Me-Move as a way to get more opportunities to buy.

For those who thought Google Base was yet another nerdy, slightly hard-to-use product from Google, it’s time to take another look. This week, pictures of Google Real Estate surfaced. RealEstate.Google.com (I’ll assume they’ll call it that) is a new service built on top of Google Base, but tailored to the needs of home buyers, renters, realtors, FSBO sellers, and basically anyone involved in the sale or leasing of property.

What’s more, Google has shown that it plans to integrate listings into its main search results. Search “Atlanta For Rent� and you’ll be wisked directly to Google Real Estate’s for-rent listings in Atlanta, complete with a Google Map showing all the properties, just like HousingMaps.com (whose creator, by the way, now works for Google).

For consumers, this will make it easier to find houses for sale or properties for rent. If Google Real Estate takes over, no longer will consumers have to visit multiple sites to see everything that’s available in the marketplace. For sellers and landlords, it will lower the cost of advertising available properties. For middlemen, like realtors and apartment locators, it will be a must-advertise location.

What if Google pulls it off? Let’s fast forward 10 years: assume Google creates a single massive marketplace for real estate. They get every available listing into Google Real Estate—from the sketchiest HUD-subsidized properties to the highest-end luxury properties, short-term vacation rentals, homes, apartments, condos, land for sale, commercial property… everything.

What problems will consumers encounter then? Is simply porting traditional list-and-wait advertising to the web truly the best way to match buyers and sellers or lessors and lessees of real estate? The answer, we think, is no.

What is TenantMarket?

TenantMarket is a service that will help connect supply and demand in the rental market. Pretty vague, right? We’ll be able to say more when we launch our service later this Spring. Suffice it to say:

#1 Unlike previous Internet ventures in the rental housing market, our first priority is not large apartment communities and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's). Our aim is helping renters find properties from independent and small landlords.

#2 TenantMarket is not another listing service.

Who’s behind it?

A small team based in Austin, Texas led by me (Jeremy Bencken). I previously co-founded ApartmentRatings.com.

After five years helping ApartmentRatings.com become one of the Internet’s most widely-used apartment-hunting websites (according to comScore the site was #6 in renter traffic, according to Alexa.com #5), I decided to take what I learned and develop a service that helps the least-served consumers in the rental market. With the help of some MBA students from the McCombs School of Business at UT-Austin, over the course of nine months, we interviewed and surveyed hundreds of small and independent landlords nationwide. Combined with our years of experience serving renters, we discovered a number of pain points still plague the process of filling vacancies via the Internet. From this process, we created a roadmap for TenantMarket.com. We’re confident this service will dramatically improve the rental market for both landlords and renters.

Why a blog?

While our product is still in the oven, we felt a blog would be the best way to start contributing to the on-going discussion about technology and business and its intersection with the rental housing market. We have opinions to share about developments like Craigslist v. Oodle, Google Maps, and Edgeio, the impact of the Internet on local advertising, not to mention the cool stuff on blogs like Techcrunch, eHub, and Scoble’s blog. Our goal is to participate in the blogosphere conversation even while our product is still baking.

Who is writing this blog?

We’ll have postings from two groups: TechBiz (our management and marketing teams) and Coredev (our development team). TechBiz will cover Internet marketing, strategy, industry commentary, Austin, and startup life. Coredev will cover web development ranging from fun with MySQL, Javascript, and Java to helpful tricks and tips we find along the way.

Who should read this blog?

Anyone with property to rent
People who rent their home
Industry analysts and wonks
Real Estate Brokers, Agents, and Apartment Locators
Geeks
Startup Entrepreneurs & Bootstrappers
Anyone with a passion for using the Internet to better connect supply and demand.

We’re looking forward to a great conversation!