Dan describes how his RentMarketer and other sites work.

Dan Daugherty from RentMarketer sits down with me and discussed which business models work well in different rental verticals.

Dan likes the fix cost ads (similar to RentVine) for single family homes and a hybrid model for apartments.

pmDave (Dave Dugdale’s new site for people new to property management): How is mobile going to change the rental ad industry?

Dan Daugherty: I think in the next 2 to 4 years we will see a dramatic increase in GPS applications. As your users may know Iphone just released their 3G GPS IPhone. What I see is a lot of applications are going to get built for the for sale market and the rental market.

I don’t see us searching for properties any more, rather properties finding us. I mean demographically psychographically maybe I have children, maybe I want to live somewhere in Colorado. A system will know here is your monthly income, here you have 3 kids you probably need a 4 bedroom house and maybe Highlands Ranch is the best place for you to be.

Or I can tell the system any time I am within a 2 mile radius within a property that fits my needs let me know and as you are driving around you will be able to be pinged a property that matches your needs. Then you could go see it or receive more information on and you could take a look at it later on.

I think there are huge advertising implications to this on the apartment communities because now you can image you are athletic and you want a community that fits your needs that has volleyball courts gyms and like that. That fits your price range.

You could image driving near DTC (Denver Tech Center) where there are a lot of apartment communities and you can getting pinged in a one block radius for properties that fit your needs.

Now from an advertising perspective – image this – Dave I know you are interested in one of our properties or maybe you have never heard of our properties but we have a unit that matches your needs – if you come in right now we will give you half a month off your rent for example or one year free pizza or something like that . Advertising is going to change the way people find properties as well because it is going to be more targeted towards me, and where I am right now and not on my computer.

PmDave: Are you working on something like that right now?

Dan Daugherty: No – not yet – [laughing].

PmDave (Dave Dugdale’s new site for people new to property management): How is Rentbits.com coming?

Dan Daugherty: RentBits are vertical search engine is doing quite well – we launched it about 3 months ago we are seeing slow increase in traffic. We are not doing a lot of advertising right now, we want to make sure the user experience is the best possible, we want to make sure we are crawling as many sites as possible.

Sites like Oodle.com Vast.com and GoogleBase are great services that crawl all classifieds and then you have ubber vertical search engines like indeed.com and simplyhired.com or Trulia.com and that is where we want to be just focused on rentals and have the best user experience as possible.

PmDave: Who is the largest in that vertical?

Dan Daugherty: I think Oodle is in terms of unique visitors.

RentMarketer just launched RentBits.com which is a 180 direction change for the company.

RentMarketer which has been around for several years is a distribution channel. RentMarketer basically will take one rental listing and then distribute it out to many sites (such as RentVine.com).

Now with the addition of RentBits they are changing direction to aggregator (similar to Oodle.com) while still staying a distributor. RentBits goes out and spiders rentals sites like RentVine and then they place a small description and thumbnail photo and then links back to the original source.

Oodle.com does this already, however RentBits will be able to specialize in just the rental industry and should have the advantage.

I went to Oodle.com today and noticed that they are now accepting listings on their site. So now I guess you could consider Oodle as a competitor to sites like Rentals.com and RentalHouses. Perhaps I missed it but appears Oodle.com try to add that feature very quietly (I rechecked their blog and didn’t see it mentioned).

And once again a company like RentalHomePros is being trumped by yet other company to have access to some rich data on rental properties.

RentMarketer released a new look for their site this morning and I think they hit the nail on the head with the new design.

The Flash movie really gets the point across. I have made a few suggestions to Dan over the years about how he should show a graph to drive home the point of where most of the leads come from. I think he finally listened to me!

I hope Dan has been tracking conversions to his site with some analytics package because my guess is that he will double the sign ups from the home page with the new design.

Good work Dan. (I also like that my site being included in the Flash movie!).

(Dan, since you changed the logo you might want to change the favicon too).

RentMarketer is now displaying job postings from SimplyHired on their site. You can also post job listing as well from the RentMarketer site.

Looks like the price is $10 bucks for 60 days to post.

Looks like Dan is trying to create all the niche verticals he can within his space. Smart move in my opinion to at least test it to see if it will bring him any extra affiliate money.

Dan over at RentMarketer launched a new posting package today that allows for unlimited postings. It sounds like many property managers like the flexibility of an unlimited package.

No price is listed on the site yet for the monthly fee.

It will be interesting to see if this new package becomes a favorite among property managers. Judging from the unlimited package that RentalHouses had, I will guess it will be popular.

I am still trying to figure out a discount pricing plan for my site. I know I need one, I just want to make sure I provide the right one.