It wasn’t very long ago, when the best way to find a tenant for a rental home was to place a sign in the yard, and an ad in the newspaper. It wasn’t a great way to find a tenant, it was simply the best way. Using MLS has always been marginally effective, primarily because the compensation offered via co-brokerage makes it barely worth the cost of gas to the agent to tour around 5 or 10 rental homes. That’s a sad statement, but if the financials aren’t driving your business, what does?

A few years ago, craigslist burst onto the scene. I remember the first time I heard about craigslist. I had just sold a client a new home in North Phoenix, and she was hoping to find a roommate. She mentioned craigslist to me as something that folks in California were using.

Fast forward to today and my own marketing plan for managing homes for rent. Without a doubt, craigslist is the #1 most effective tool for me in finding a tenant to rent a home. My statistics in that regard tell me that 60% of all inquiries about a home for rent come from someone seeing my ads on craigslist, but over 90% of all tenants I have placed, were the direct result of craigslist. Let me repeat that: 90% of all tenants I have placed, found out about the home on craigslist.

Other than craigslist, I have co-broked a rental listing via MLS 1 time. That could have been avoided, but the terms of the co-broked tenant were too good to pass up. I have rented a home via the sign in the yard a couple of times. Every other time, the source of the successful lead was from craigslist.

Why does craigslist work?

I believe it works, because that’s where the majority of the inventory for rental homes in the greater Phoenix area is located. If you are looking for a rental home, you’ll find a very high percentage of all of the rental inventory in craigslist. People searching for a home for rent are going to search at the one place where they think they can find most, if not all, of the inventory. And inventory is king. Like content for a web site, inventory is paramount to a home listing source. The majority of the rental searching public has learned they can find homes on craigslist, so they search there.

To enhance my rental listings from the majority on craigslist, I use PostLets.com to create a virtual flyer, which I use as the ad on craigslist. That virtual flyer gets syndicated to other listing sites, like Google Base, HotPads, Trulia, etc., but I rarely get a response from those sites. On the rare occasions I do get a response, the home was rented long ago. The virtual flyer I make looks something like this when seen on craigslist:

While the typical “good” craigslist ad looks like this:

Which ad catches your eye better? Which do you think will get better results? There are a few people that will be put off by the commercialism of my ads, but overall, my response rate is too compelling for me to consider changing.

WordPress Statistics

The other thing I do in my craigslist ads, to gauge their effectiveness, is provide a link to my blog similar to:

Each time someone clicks I learn two things. 1) the person was interested enough by the craigslist ad, they wanted more info. 2) today, we had XYZ interested people.

Thanks to WordPress stats, I know exactly how many people click through to the blog:

If I’m not getting click throughs, the likely answer is the home is priced too high for the area, and thus there isn’t much interest in the home. Rental prices are extremely narrow in the precision with which we need to price them. It can be the case that being too high by $25/month can cause a rental listing to languish.

Craigslist just plain works in Phoenix. It may not work in every part of the US, but at least here, it’s hyper effective. I won’t go so far as to stop using a sign or stop using MLS, but for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to use craigslist with each and every rental listing.

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