When I started RentVine 5 years ago I remember studying Hometownrent.com way back then. Hometownrent.com is unique to all other rental sites out there. Their strategy consist of not just having one website for all their national listings, but over 1,000 different smaller sites such as ChapelHillRent.com to display their listings.

I got to meet Andrew Pearson a managing partner for Hometownrent.com a few years back at a NARPM conference I enjoyed talking to him about his strategy. Andrew is a sharp guy.

I like to compare my site’s traffic to my competitors but with HomeTownRent I can’t. It would take me forever to add up all their traffic on all their sites using a service like Compete.com. I have a feeling if you did, they would have a big number, and rank well against sites like Rentals.com and RentalHomesPlus.com.

They do charge for their listings, for example in Chapel Hill they charge $45 per year for one listing, but for Albetville Alabama you can post for free.

To be honest when I was studying their site many years ago I thought that it wouldn’t be a very successful strategy, but I was wrong – over 5 years later after many rental sites have crashed and burned, HomeTownRent keeps plugging away.

I gotta think that HomeTownRent (Rental Ventures, Inc.) must be one of GoDaddy’s favorite clients.

HomeTownRent.com has an interesting way of getting themselves out there.

Instead of doing one site for the entire nation, they have created many sites, one for each metro area. I have not counted, but I am guessing they own about 400 web sites. Very interesting approach. In a way they are a regional web site with a national reach.

I thought of doing that years ago but many issues are involved:

• Paying for the domain names and hosting for each regional site.
• Maintaining each site – wow that would be a pain.
• Duplicate content issues – Google doesn’t like duplicate content. In fact someone at the last SMX Advance conference asked a question about doing multi-regional sites like this and Matt Cutts from Google advised against it. Matt said to make one really good site.