Tips to Improve Your Rental Business

Today we continue our series about the challenges facing rental professionals. You can read the first part of our series here: “Do You Want to Move More Rentals.” In the first article, we addressed the problem of deal flow. Now, we’ll take a look two more, equally problematic challenges.

Challenge #2: Ineffective Ads
Creating and publishing an effective ad is an art and a science. RentJuice provides an excellent whitepaper about publishing ads. We highly recommend you download their whitepaper, which will tell you the best practices for publishing your rental listings online. The report is full of useful info, but here are just a few key findings:

1) Post ads on the weekend. RentJuice’s research indicated that Friday was the worst possible day to post ads (they were viewed an average of 18 times) while Sundays were the best, with an average 27 views.

2) Post ads in the evening. Most rental professionals post ads between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. Unfortunately – most rental professionals are wrong. If you want to succeed – dare to be different and post at a different time: in the evening.

Data from RentJuice shows that ads posted between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. were viewed 26 times on average – that’s compared to 19 times on average for ads posted earlier during the day.

Do quick-and-dirty ads work - or do spelling and grammar really count? Are short ad titles more effective, or should you write longer titles? Should you stick with a single template, or try more than one? Download the full whitepaper for the answers to these questions and more.

Challenge #3: Inefficiency
Deep breath . . . where to begin with inefficiency. The truth is, inefficiency runs rampant when it comes to rental listings. We talked with Kyle Paice of RentJuice to learn more.

• First, there’s the time-consuming data entry involved with publishing a listing to multiple websites (and then updating that listing, if necessary). Hours and hours can be wasted. In fact, many rental brokers have employees dedicated entirely to these tasks.

“We end all that inefficient data entry,” says Kyle. “You can publish listings to multiple websites or update your listings with only a single click. It saves time and money.”

• Second, trying to sort through numerous listings in order to locate potential matches for leads can be incredibly time-consuming. RentJuice can help. Leads are tracked and matched with any listings that meet their requirements. With more matched listings, brokers are more likely to match a potential renter with a property.

• Handling paperwork and tracking deals can be time-consuming – unnecessarily so, says Kyle. "RentJuice provides credit and background checks; we generate applications, then we digitize and store them."

Stay tuned for our next rental-focused article.