In the past, we have advertised our properties on Craig’s List (CL), and had great success, but we have not had to do so in over a year. We use Postlets so the ad goes on a long list of sites, but CL has produced the most action by far in the past. We just started advertising our most popular property, and have gotten surprisingly few responses through CL. The response has generally been good, but most of the response has come through Zillow. Have you noticed a change in where your responses are coming from? What do you find to be your best source for advertising your rentals?
To clarify, we just started advertising one of our properties using Craig’s List (CL) and Postlets. Postlets posts to Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, etc. This property normally has one or two showings per day until rented after about a week. Over the last 1.5 weeks, our CL response has been very low, but our Zillow response has been good (not great). Last year, we had great response from CL, and minimal response through other sites.
I get a lot of responses from CL but unfortunately the leads are not always impressive… I have had several people contact me, look at the property, fill out an ap, agree to rent the property then they disclose they dont have any money for rent and no money for a deposit… I would like to know the quality difference between CL and zillow.
I’ve come to the conclusion that craigslist is good for a quick barometer check of the market. If things are slow, CL is slow. If the market is hot, so is CL.
It’s also a great place to test ad copy. Our ridiculously basic, simple, three-line ads, including a call to action, gets more results than any of our shiny, clickable, png ads geared toward sellers. FWIW
Used only CL for many years and worked well driving all my tenants. It’s become less effective as a ton more peeps are advertising on CL with flood of new investor rentals and non-traditional listings like apartments. When used to post would be first page for a few hours, now it’s more like maybe 20 minutes. Just started getting more aggressive by posting 3 slightly different versions of my advertisement, then login each day and renew one of 3 (you can renew every 3 days). Still draw most of my new tenants from CL.
Most showings good and have learned to weed out the 20 - 30% unqualified showings over the phone. Ask if have proof of income, current employment, # of proposed tenants, and pets. The biggest wastes I’ve found are peeps that text/email (flakes!), looking for a friend that is moving to town soon (friend won’t come through), or visiting and considering moving to town (vacationing look-e-loos).