Looks like I might have found a loophole in Primedia’s network of sites pricing. Instead of writing a blog post about it, I thought what the heck I will make a quick video.

Watch the video below:

Update 1: Ha, I was right a day later a rep from rentals.com emailed me with a 15% discount. I thought it might have been 20 so I was close. So if you want to save either wait or post on rentalhouses.com.

Update 2: I got a call from a rentals.com sales rep a couple of days after asking if I needed any help. I told her I was a competitor and she was really nice about it.

Wow! The following (from an apparent insider) showed up on a comment to a recent post.

Everyone,

As you know, effective April 3rd our Standard and Featured ads will increase in price. In addition, we will no longer offer Money Back Guarantees or Free Yard Signs. The yard signs will now sell for $19.95 each.

We want our customers to know that change is good and that we’re constantly working to offer them newer and better features and tools, but change is not always easy so we’ll be offering special pricing for the month of April only. The regularly priced $69 Featured ads will be available at the discount price of just $59.

Since these changes come right after Jamie Cylmer’s entrance I am guessing he is the one writing this memo.

That makes me laugh, “We want our customers to know that change is good“. I am not sure I would want to sell that idea to my customers that a price hike is good. I wonder it Robert Metz knows what Jamie Cylmer is doing.

I want to know what the “better features and tools” are – does that include translating the listing to Spanish? That is the only new feature I have noticed in a long time. Are the reps informing the property managers of the higher prices and then softening the blow by telling them that their listing can be translated for an extra fee?

Again, I can’t confirm this post. But, if true, this is huge. Why is it huge? Because in the Internet world, just like the computer industry prices go down not up – it is almost a death sentence to raise prices.

I can tell you as a rental listing site owner, the pricing has little to do with the companies expenses. The price is determined by what the market can bare.

I have very little expenses so it would be very difficult for me to go out of business. I would guess the majority of Rentals.com expenses are in salaries and rent. In my company there is just one employee (me) and I work out of my house. Just think if I were the #1 ranked site in the US, I could actually lower prices and kill off CSI.

I am watching the Rentals.com site today to see what happens.

I wonder what David Borden would think of what is happening to his old company? David Borden is the one that set the pricing for the whole industry when he started RentClicks.com. The $39 price was determined from one lost day of rent on an average-priced rental.

By the way, you can list with RentVine for the low low price of $38 a listing!! And that is for 40 days not 30.

Tonight two people have told me the same rumor that Rentals.com has let go Rob Massey, Kevin Spaulding, and Gail Carter.

Now here is the big question, when will RentalHouses.com domain registration finally be updated to the new correct owner of CSI? Right now it still has Rob Massey’s name on it even though it has been over a year since CSI bought Rob’s site.

Sometimes when you transfer the ownership of a domain you can have drop in rankings on Google.

I am guessing that Rob Massey had some sort of agreement that he would still own the domain as long as he worked there. But now that he doesn’t work there (so the rumor goes) will they finally change the who-is record so I can watch the site drop in Google?

If they don’t change the who-is record I know they can get in to trouble with the ICANN organization.

“PROVIDING FALSE CONTACT INFORMATION CAN BE GROUNDS FOR DOMAIN NAME CANCELLATION”

I would like to keep my karma in tact so I won’t be turning them in.

Update: Bill Quirk has confirmed the rumors on his blog. Also the pictures and bios are off the RentalHouses.com site.

I alway love it when I am above rentals.com in the rankings for a large city like Vegas.

I have been the president of RentVine.com since it started, but rentals.com has gone through 3 presidents in very short order.

I am happy that Rentals.com is under going so much change and instability. Any guesses how long Jamie Clymer will last?

Before rentals.com Jamie Clymer was the Vice President and General Manager of Homes.com.

Here is a video of Jamie Clymer when he was at Homes.com. In minute 1:42 he talks about speed, so perhaps he will speed up the rentals.com site. At minute 6:30 I am not sure he answered the question very well on why people should pay for his site.

A few hours ago, I heard that “Robert Turnbull and 4 other higher-ups were let go today at Rentals.com and their position is no longer being needed“.

I tried to get it confirmed from various sources, but as it turned out Bill Quirk (Rentals.com employee) confirmed just a little bit ago on his blog.

Is it strange to see this kind of turnover at a company that is supposed to be doing well?

From the rentals.com site:

We are experiencing technical difficulties. You may experience timeout errors or delays while using our web site. We appreciate your patience as our team works to restore the site to the performance level and convenience that you would expect from Rentals.com.

What is odd is that the site appears to be running at its normally slow speed.

My site’s home page takes about 90,000 bytes to load, and Rentals.com takes over 750,000 bytes to load.

I was checking my Google rankings last week for some terms that I normally don’t look at, and as usual I saw that Rentals.com had the number #1 spot, however something caught my eye in Rentals.com’s result.

In the snippet of the Rentals.com result something looked very familiar. After reading it twice, I said to myself, “Hey, I wrote that.” The next thought in my head was, “Oh, Google must have screwed up some how and put my text there – there is no way Rentals.com would have copied it.”

So I went to the actual page on the Rentals.com site and then pulled up the corresponding page on my site and sure enough an entire paragraph had been copied word-for-word from my site.

I had to call my wife over and have her look at it, perhaps I was missing something. She saw the same thing. So odd to see a large company copy from a small one, typically it is the other way around.

My next thought was, “Wow, I wonder how long”. So using the WayBack Machine I noticed that it had been copied as far back as August or perhaps earlier than that.

To be honest I was not mad or upset, mostly curious how this could have happened. I have never filed a DMCA against anyone before because you can usually never find the person to file it against, so I thought calling Rentals.com directly would be the best course of action.

So I picked up the phone and dialed Rentals.com (that felt strange). I had a conversation with an employee of Rentals.com.

The person I spoke with was nice and told me action would be taken right away. Sure enough and hour or so later the content was gone.