Looks like RentalHomesPlus let another sexy banner ad appear on their site again.

I like to tease them about this because I would like property managers to know that RentVine does not carry any banner ads.

Property managers should know that their property listings won’t have to compete with sexy ads like this one.

I am guessing that RentalHomesPlus makes only 5% of their revenue from banner ads on their site - is it worth it?

What are your thoughts, do banner ads cheapen the value of the site?

On a side note, I tease RentalHomesPlus about this but all the other major rentals sites like Rentals.com and RentalHouses.com carry these banner ads too that have little to do with renting a home. I tease RentalHomesPlus most often because their banner ads appear to be the most irrelevant.

I was looking in my stats today and found this - I gotta chuckle out of it.

I am hearing rumors down in Florida that www.RentalHomesPlus.com is offering some large property managers an unlimited pricing plan of $300 till the end of the year.

This of course makes sense because www.RentalHouses.com I hear is ending their unlimited plan of $300 at the end of this year.

I think this is a smart strategy for RentalHomesPlus to pull large property managers away from RentalHouses.com before the unlimited spigot runs dry.

I am starting to think that the unlimited plan for large PM’s is never going to go away however.

At RentVine.com I am staying clear of the unlimited plan - I might offer a volume discount someday, but in order to do that I think I would need a sales force which I am not willing do.

From an Inman News Special Report, Kevin Doyle Apartments.com senior vice president and general manager is actually quoted saying:

Apartments.com’s sister site, www.RentalHomesPlus.com, boasts more than 7,000 rental home listings, said Kevin Doyle, Apartments.com senior vice president and general manager.

Both sites share the same parent company, Classified Ventures LLC, a joint venture owned by some of the biggest names in newspaper publishing: Belo Corp., Gannett Co. Inc., The McClatchy Co., Tribune Co. and The Washington Post Co.

Not only do we derive a large amount of traffic through our very good organic search-engine optimization from Google and Yahoo!, but if you’re looking for an apartment on the Chicago Tribune Web site or the L.A. Times or Washington Post, our exclusive rental listings are available on the rental channels of those newspaper sites.”

The first time I read that quote I thought Kevin Doyle was saying that RentalHomePlus ranked well, but I guess he meant just Apartments.com.

[Note: You can skip this post if you are not into SEO]

OK… I know I said I was going to try to be less negative and more positive with this blog, but I had a good chuckle on this one.

Google Groups post on subdomains.

This can be a complex issue which can lead to much confusion. I am not trying to give the RentalHomesPlus SEO a hard time, I just think the comment when he is granted permission to post the URL is the interesting part.

I ask questions all the time in forums, there is a ton to learn there, however I am surprised that a company of Classified Ventures magnitude would be posting there - it just isn’t seen all that often.

I am scratching my head trying to figure out how RentalHomesPlus is getting so many listings on their site.

I studied their Florida listings because that seems to be their best territory right now. They currently have 3,674 listings in Florida. In my opinion, 2,011 of those do not count because they are coming in from newspaper ads which I am guessing are paid for at the newspaper level and does not add to RentalHomesPlus bottom line at all.

So of the 1,663 real listings, I am guessing about 100 of those are from RentMarketer.

So why do they have so many listings? And how are they getting traffic to listings in several of their popular cities like Jacksonville, Tampa or Orlando…

- and without any traffic how are those listings generating any leads?
- and without leads why are property managers still buying listings from them?

For instance take a look at their Tampa market, they have 188 listings there (none of those appear to be coming from the newspaper). If you do a search for “houses for rent in Tampa” on Google, RHP does not appear in the top 100 organic results or the paid listings on the right hand side. Now they do rank #13 in Yahoo, so they are getting a little traffic there. They rank around #30 on MSN, so they can’t be getting much traffic from there. I also notice they do not appear to be advertising on Yahoo’s network or on MSN (Live).

So if RHP is not getting traffic from the organic and paid results in the search engines, how are they getting enough traffic to sell these ads?

A few guesses:

• Perhaps they have a superstar sales rep for that territory.
• Or, more likely, they have gone to the old ways of RentalHouses.com and are now selling an unlimited plan to property managers??

These are only guesses and I would love to know why property managers are using them?

Anyone reading this have an unlimited plan or some major discount with RentalHomesPlus they would like to share????

Update:

I guess I missed it yesterday but you can see above that RHP is buying AdWords to drive traffic to their site. I am guessing this is their main source of traffic.

The rumor is that Brian Frisby has left RentalHomesPlus. If you look at the current Google cached About page it has:

“Brian Frisby
Director of Sales
RentalHomesPlus”

But when you look at their current About page, Brian’s name is gone. I emailed Brian and others to see if it was true, but I got no comment back.

Also I am hearing that Classified Ventures has a job posting similar to Brian’s job description.

Brian was kind enough to come on my podcast show a while back. I really got the impression that he knew the industry extremely well.

I wish him the best of luck at whatever venture he is starting (that is what I am hearing).

With Brian leaving, could this mean that RentalHomesPlus is in trouble?

[If Brian is reading this, please let us know what you are up to.]

Update: it has been confirmed that Brian is leaving RHP.

Looks like RentalHomesPlus has raised prices back to the previous $49 level. It was $39 dollars for 30 days.

Sort of odd to see such a large company go back and forth on this issue. I am sure it has some property managers confused.

I was looking at my stats today for this blog and I noticed a few hits from people searching for RentalHomesPlus Site Change so I decided to take a look. Sure enough the site looked different. I just spoke with one of the people over at RentalHomesPlus and he indicated they just released the new version yesterday.

At least RentalHomesPlus is smart enough to do a major change on a weekend (Rentals.com has done major changes mid-week). The RHP contact told me they are still working out a few little bugs, but it seems to be going well.

Some of the major changes to the site are mapping (MapQuest), photos are larger, SEO changes and some lead reporting.

I just forwarded a lead generation spreadsheet from one of my clients that is also a client on RentalHomesPlus so I was able to compare my stats to RentalHomesPlus - I only took a look at one property so far but my site generated almost 4 times the detailed page views for that ad than RentalHomesPlus did (112 for RHP, 415 for RentVine).

To be fair I have not studied the rest of stats from my clients spreadsheet yet (I have the girls today) - but I was happy to see the mid-priced rental ($1,300 a month) was getting more traffic than RHP.

The person who sent me over the spreadsheet seemed pretty excited about it so I guess I need to get working on one of my own email reports.

As I reported last month RentalHomesPlus without any fanfare produced a $19.99 plan and now has just as quietly gotten rid of it.

Sounds like they were testing it out - I guess we all know what the results were.

Now that RentalHomesPlus is the FARPM Annual Partner for 2007-2008, RentalHomesPlus is offering a $10 discount with the promo code: FARPM.

I wonder if Rentals.com and RentalHomesPlus had a bidding war over that partnership?

I got word from this comment on my blog that RentalHomesPlus will be the ‘Official 07-08 Annual Partner’ for FARPM.

Are we starting to see the start of RentClicks/Rentals loss of absolute power over the industry? I wonder if there was a bidding war for the partnership?

This move from RentalHomesPlus shows us how aggressive they are going to be with sales down in Florida.

This kind of gives me credit of getting another one of my predictions coming true for 2007. I said we would see a new partner for NARPM in my predictions (which kind of happened), now we are seeing this happening to FARPM.