Has Craigslist Killed Rental Listing Sites?

The true answer is: not at all. In comparing the performance of the top competing rental sites, factoring average lead volume, effectiveness, cost per lead and cost per conversion, you will quickly discover the following:

• Craigslist is nowhere close to being FREE, you have to factor in payroll cost to have the ads posted, failure/flag rates, etc. You must also factor in the loss in potential by not being able to submit your entire portfolio at once. We have found that Craigslist produces a CPL comparable to that of Rentals.com and Apartments.com.
• You’ll be lucky to get more than a few ads live a day, have the risk of being flagged by your competition creating an unfair advantage and will need to invest in a PVA/IP/POSTING solution (which probably won’t be very successful) just to keep your ads live.
• Leads from Craigslist cannot be parsed into a CRM (client relationship manager) for organization and operational efficiencies. As leads arrive via email in a set format from sites like Rentals.com, CondoRentalAds.com and ApartmentRentalAds.com, you can easily write a script to parse out the leads into a CRM such as HighRise or Sugar. The time required for manual entry into a CRM should also be factored into your CPL forecasting.
• Listings do not stay live until the vacancy has been filled. They are lucky to stay live for a few hours, and even if they do your competitors re-posts will flood the results, reducing the effectiveness of your ads by the minute.

You can do the math for your property management company by making a spreadsheet to track the average cost per lead for any site that charges you “per listing” or requires an extensive amount of time to post and manage your listings (i.e. Craigslist). You just need three columns 1) Cost of listing 2) # of leads, 3) CPL =sum(1/2). For Craigslist, cost = payroll+pvas+IPsolution. By doing this you can quickly identify the sites you should be advertising on and which sites you should try to avoid.

Great interview from RentVine.com with David Borden on how rental listing sites can still compete with Craigslist:

July 30, 2011 at 5:09 pm | Professional Tips | No comments