I love it! RentalHouses.com raised their prices!

It was rumored on this blog to happen.

It was $39 for 30 days, $69 for 60 days and $99 for 90 days.

Now it is $49 for 30 days, $79 for 60 days and $109 for 90 days.

Their network of sites were also raised $10 across the board.

Odd that Rentals.com has not raised its rates along with RentalHouses.

Now they match RentalHomesPlus price of $49.

It appears that most of RentalHouses.com Denver listings this morning are missing photos.

I am guessing that RentalHouses.com is aware of this.

Update: I am seeing images now.

It appears the reporter or Robert Turnbull is a little confused:

The primary focus covers our core business, single-family homes, which is what RentClicks.com and Rentalclicks.com really focused on.

I have never heard of Rentalclicks.com.

Under the department that you can’t believe all that you read on the web, I found this on a forum:

Appreciate your comments. I agree completely with what you’ve said. the dot com of rentalhouses sold for 80k recently. i know that doesn’t mean that much but a big company was prepared to develop the name.

Might be kind of neat to start up a UK version on my site and buy his UK TLD domain.

Who knows maybe he is right, but I am pretty sure that Rob Massey bought that domain years ago. Perhaps we can get Rob to comment on this.

OK, I have to hand to Dan Daugherty over at RentMarketer - he is starting to out scoop me on the the latest news! Go Dan!

It is best to go over to his new blog at RentBits to read the full story.

I am scratching my head with the whole SEO excuse.

All I know is that it is good for me! Property managers will get upset with RentalHouses and look else where for an advertising solution.

It will be kinda nice to have everyone on a even playing field now, unless RentalHomesPlus decides to try something.

Many know that RentalHouses.com will be ending their volume discount at the end of this year.

I have some code work to do, but I hope to have my automated volume discount in place before RentalHouses discount ends.

I will predict that I will not be the only site to start a discount plan before the end of the year.

Property managers that I spoke to at the NARPM conference are looking for options instead of paying Rentals.com and RentalHouses full price.

What better way to get my foot in the door than to fill that void.

I got a tip that RentalHouses.com is not advertising in the NARPM newsletter in this month’s issue.

Sure enough when I looked I could not find them anywhere except for Robert Massey’s article bio.

Perhaps this is a sign that CSI is going to get rid of RentalHouses soon?

From the latest SEC filing:

“In February of 2007, the Company acquired the assets of RentalHouses.com, for approximately $9,000 in cash. The Company has not yet completed its purchase price allocation and in the interim has classified the intangible assets to goodwill.”

I am not a finance guy, but I am guessing $9k really means $9M. Perhaps building up a user base by giving away unlimited plans for $299 paid off well for the owners of RentalHouses.

I ran across Rob’s blog a couple of weeks ago. At least I think it is Bob’s because no where on the site does he credit himself (you have to look up the WhoIs info). Judging who is on his blogroll I would bet that he is the author.

I don’t normally link to my competitors but here it Rob’s Blog.

I not sure what Rob’s roll is with the CSI company, or if he is still actively working for them. I guess there must be some arrangement since he still holds ownership of the RentalHouses.com domain.

UPDATE: Rob has a nice long post about himself on his blog.

I got tipped off that the RentalHouses leadership page had changed. It appears that the RentalHouses leadership team has been downsized.

Two people appear to have left the company: David Richardson and Robert Machado.

I have always been baffled why RentalHouses had such a large leadership team. Of course I am biased since I do it all myself.

Google has rolled out Personalized Search recently. Basically this means if you have any sort of Google account (GMail, AdWords, Groups, Alerts, etc.), Google will save by default your search history and then start showing you results that are tailored to the sites you visit the most.

What does this mean for the rental ad industry? The way I see it is–the rich get richer.

Take a property manager that has been using RentalHouses for years. She decides she might look around for another site to advertise with and does a search for “xxx rental homes”, where xxx is her city.

Because she has visited RentalHouses hundreds of times before, Google says “She must really like RentalHouses, so lets make RentalHouses #1 for her, even though RentalHouses may not be #1 for anyone else.

A site like mine might never get noticed even if I do make it to #1 in a year or two. This is frustrating.

Does it seem fair that the big rental sites keep getting bigger and bigger? Is Google giving them competitive advantage?

I keep working on my site bit by bit hoping to improve just a little each day. For the first time that I can remember I am actually beating RentalHouses on Google for a city.

Above is from the search “Corvallis Rental Homes” on Google which RentVine is ranking #6 and RentalHouses is ranking #7.

In all fairness RentalHouses kicks my “you-know-what” for all the other cities out there, but I will take this small victory nonetheless! I think I should have a beer to celebrate!

One thing I have not checked yet is to see if Google is personalizing my results to make my site rank higher just for me. I am pretty sure I have personalization turned off. I need to check that pre-beer.