RentVine turned 4 today! I have had a ton of fun working for myself. I can remember this well because my youngest was born around the same time.

My oldest was born around the time I started FlashAppointments (6 years ago), but I sold that company to my partner about 3 years ago.

OK, yes I am #1 on the new wefollow site under the “rentals” tag, but there are only two of us!  Once Dan D. adds himself I will drop down on the list.

I know I have been writing about other rental web sites on my http://rentvine.wordpress.com/blog, but I thought I would write about AllStudentRentals.com here.

• It appears like the site started about 8 months ago and is run by two guys out of CA.
• It appears the site makes their money from a pay-per lead pricing model.
• Right now it appears their coverage is pretty limited to CA.
• They use a lot of Flash. Flash is near to my heart since I founded FlashAppointements.com many years ago and then handed it over to the partner I had. However you need to careful when using it too much.
• Judging by their traffic on Compete.com they are off to a little bit of a dumpy ride which is to be expected with a new site. I am going to have that myself with my new PickRent.com site that I am still working on.
• I have only looked over the site for about 10 minutes, but I can tell you the Flash they have is cool but they really need to be careful with it because of the page load times. They also need to work on their title tags.

I ran across an interesting apartment site (and blog) the other day. I emailed back and forth with Arpit Jain and he explains the site with the following:

To help the users searching for rental apartments in a location, we are developing an apartment search engine that can automatically crawl thousands of apartment listings from all over the Web. Just like what Trulia does for real-estate or Google does for web pages, we are doing it for apartment rentals. You can visit the site at: apartments.cazoodle.com.

Seems like this model is taking off.

I think they need to fix the US map on the home page however, I wanted to use it as navagation not voting.

I just got off the phone with Aaron Hassen of RentBlurb.com. He is looking for a buyer of his regional rental site for the Orlando area which ranks pretty well on Google.

His site is done in PHP.

If you know anyone that is interested, have them contact Aaron on his contact form.

It is a little sad to see a regional site looking to sell.

Update: I just got this from Aaron:

As you are aware, your blog is highly influential and monitored by major players in our industry. With your help we have now received a number of bids to purchase our site. I’m writing today to inform you and your audience that this Friday, August 29th will be the last day we will be accepting bids for the purchase of RentBlurb.com. After Friday we will begin the process of selecting a buyer.

Just wanted my users to know that RentVine is clean of any suspicious malware according to Google. Always nice when Google has something nice to say about your site.

What would be cool is to put this in a seal format and place it on my About Us page to help with confidence for my site.

I posted this video over on my PmDave.com site but I thought people on this blog might be interested on how Wendy Frenzel at A Vantage Properties advertises her properties.

Very interesting tactic.

I also did a podcast with Wendy a while back if you want to listen to it.

As you can see 2008 is a great year so far for people searching for “houses for rent” on Google.

Why is it so good, is it because the housing market?