Online rental property sites are virtually everywhere nowadays. You can easily find tiny, local sites that are typically associated with one of the community news publications all the way up to the larger national sites that cater more to real estate professionals.
To help you sift through all the websites out there, we put together a quick list of the Top 5 (with a bonus site at the end) that we feel like the majority of renters will likely hit on their search for a new rental property.
Craigslist
The “granddaddy” of online classified sites still holds a place in anyone’s top 5 or 10 sites to list your rental property. On Craigslist you can find anything from a rental property to a used lawn mower ALL on the same site. This is both a blessing and a curse as in some cases you will get way more tenants (of varying qualifications) from Craigslist than any of the other online sites out there.
Zillow
Zillow does cater more to the real estate professionals and arguably more to the home buyer/seller than renter markets, but in most areas, they do have a healthy rental listing pool as well. Like a few of the others on our list, it will depend somewhat on your area as to how active the rental listing section will be for your specific neighborhood. They allow for high-quality photos with a very easy to use interface for prospective tenants to browse through images and information about each rental property.
HotPads
HotPads focuses on only rental properties. They have a great follow up system for users who enter their email addresses where they email out listing each day to remind the user of properties they had viewed and new listings that they may be interested. HotPads does tend to have more apartments and multifamily units and appears to be used actively by professional property management groups and apartment companies.
Realtor.com
Like Zillow, this site leans more towards the buyer and seller’s market than the rental market, but they still have a healthy number of rental listing especially in larger metro areas. They also send your listing to a few other sites that they own including Moving.com and DoorSteps.com all for free.
Rentals.com
Rental.com is now a group of rental sites that includes Rent.com and Lovely.com, and they now claim over a million searches each month for properties and specialize in only rental properties. There are costs associated with listing your properties on these sites and as of 2018 range from the low end of $49.99 per property per month to upwards of around $80/month depending on the listing features.
BONUS IDEA
List your property with Bay Property Management Group, and then you don’t have to worry with all these sites – keeping up with which listing is still posted and which one is generating the best-qualified tenants. We are confident that we can rent your property in 30 days or less AND if we place a tenant in one of your properties and they get evicted in the first six months we will release your property for FREE – no other company offers this kind of ironclad guarantee.
Give us a call today and let us take the marketing and management off your hands.
