Leasing & Marketing

There are a host of web-based real estate tools out there for anyone looking to acquire, revalue, or manage their properties. What I see out there is that because of the last few years being dominated by moving of single family homes, almost all of these tools are geared for the buyers with that intention.

However, there has to have been some thought put into these online services that allows for them to be easily used by those of us who are in the business of finding, acquiring, and reassessing rental housing. Hm.

Neighboroo.

The apparent purpose of Neighboroo is to throw up some nice regional statistics such as Crime (they apply their own weighting system to this, giving more weight to "violent", versus "property" crime), Politics, Elementary School Rankings, Cost of Living, and Median Income per zip code, on a google map of the US.

The pros:

Very simple interface, with obvious left hand navigation. The data provided is actually useful in doing some very top-level, simplified analysis for a given region. Nice, quick snapshot. Plus, this is a brand-spankin’ new company, and I’m honestly not even sure where they plan on going with this. I just happened across it while searching for similar internet sites.

The cons:

Not really deep on the data side. Sure, it goes down to zip code, you can even type a specific code in and get your results in an arrowed bubble, but many times zip code isn’t precise enough a measure when sniffing around a potential new investment area. And the “Population Density� section concerning race is a bit, well, racy for my taste. For an investor of my variety, the only color I’m ever concerned with is green. The rest is a waste of my time.

Side note: What would be REALLY cool is if there was a time-warping feature where one could see stats like these from the past. Perhaps it would help clue an investor in on income/population/rental value trends. Perhaps.

All-in-all, I’m going to chalk Neighboroo up as a “work in progress, with much promise�.

In our modern times, out there on the internets you can find an increasing number of Landlords who are creating websites specifically for the purpose of marketing their rental properties. You might be considering getting into this game, and you’re wondering exactly how you might want to display your inventory, visually, on your site.

Well here’s a nifty little web-based program from the Rentvine camp which they've cleverly named MapVine, that is The Google enabled and will make the mapping production for your site virtually headache free. We made one for ourselves, just for kicks, to make sure it wasn’t a bunch of hype. Check it.




Everything is free. And they’ll even be hosting your specific map on their server(s), which is nice. Unless their servers go down, or are simply sold off. This is addressed in the rather hilarious Terms of Agreement page. Great quote:

We do try to make it work the best we can, but since it is free, you get what you pay for if something goes wrong.

Got that right.

Their system was a tad slow, but it was a high-traffic time of day when I was tinkering with the thing, so take that however you’d like. I’m still pretty impressed.

I uploaded three different map elements: A traffic jam, a homeless guy’s corner that I’m renting out, and a favorite bar that I’m pretending to sell. The whole process took me a whopping ten minutes DURING high internet traffic time. All-in-all, it’s a pretty badass little tool that will keep you from having to code, so you can concentrate on more important things. Like getting those units filled.