I noticed that RentalAds.com has been getting some good traffic lately. They are up 4,799% for the year!
They seemed to come out of no where the end of last year. I don’t know anything about them except they must have paid a lot for that domain name, it was for sale for a long time. I also hear that their site is extremely well built.
The company that runs the site is very protective of their privacy based on their About Us and Contact Page. Those pages basically offer no information on who they are as well as they protected themselves by registering their domain name by proxy.
Anyone know who is running this site?
If you own this site please stop by and introduce yourself. (From what I can see you have a very nice site and you should be proud of it).
Update: it appears they are located out of St. Petersburg, Florida.
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10 users responded in this post
Dave,
They are located in the #1 State for on-line rental ads. Thay have an unlimited plan that will attract PM’s. If they can generate quality leads they will grow. But they can’t give it away for $99.00 all you can eat forever and make money!
Why not? One month unlimited from one client could cover their hosting costs for a year. If its a self service model with few overheads and they police the $99 model to prevent brokers etc from flooding the site then I could see this being a nice little earner…
Anonymous,
They can certainly do whatever they want and make money at $99 if they have little overhead. But giving 20-100 props for $99 will not get you very far!
Rentvine is in the same boat. You don’t see a low ball all you can eat plan!
$99 dollars for unlimited ads does not cover a skilled sales force, NARPM sponsorships, utility bills or even marketing material. Just ask rentalhouses folk how that model worked out the past 2 years. You would think that new websites would learn from the mistakes of previous sites, but I guess not. Homerentalads and Rentalhouses are no longer for a reason. Rentalads and other sites I seeing popping up by the day will find out the hard way. The barrier to entry is much higher than it was 4 years ago so that pricing model is extinct.
Example: Rentalhouse gave away the farm at $99 and had some many listings that they could no longer support the listings. Might work for a year but you will be eating your own tail!
Mr. Rental,
Good points! Tripling your sales means nothing when it is done by giving unlimited listings for $99.00 except to make your bio look good!
Dave,
I think they may have used a proxy in there whois to protect from spammers. I used a proxy service for my regional site only to keep domain bots from scooping my info.
As for pricing models, I don’t believe any website has figured this out in the market. I have great success with two of my packages on my website…I have others that do not do well at all. So I change them around often to see how it may attract new users in my market.
One thing I have figured out is if your website is doing well and providing an effective service then your pricing should reflect that. But the problem I have found is once you sign up a p.m. on a price plan. It is very hard to change it on them.
This may not apply to a national website. All I can say is once you see two large companies fall in search engines, as well as in number of active listings and then all of the sudden you see two new companies emerging like rentvine and rentalads into the market. That means smaller regional sites like mine must work harder to compete with them.
I don’t think “price” gets you more customers. I think an effective service that gets your customer quality leads, phone calls, etc will get you more customers!
Whether or not you can run a website on certain prices remains to be scene. I started my site two years ago and have yet to turn a large profit into my pocket. And that is only because I put every dime of my profit back into advertising..radio,mail, etc…It can get real expensive! So I can only imagine how expensive it can be for them!
Have a great weekend!
Robbie
Hi Dave,
Great blog! My name is Kyle. My wife and I are the owners of RentalAds.com. We just saw the thread and decided to reply. We’re now based out of Oklahoma City. The previous owners where in St. Petersburg, Florida, as mentioned above. We just bought the site. Just thought we’d drop by and say hello. Nice to meet you! If you want any info about RentalAds to put on your blog, just drop me an email.
Take care,
Kyle
Kyle thanks for stopping by. Glad you like the blog!
That is interesting that you got in to this market by buying a site.
Can you share the story of why you bought it?
Hi Dave,
I own a rental house myself and am also a licensed REALTOR. I thought it would be a perfect fit for me, given my experience in real estate and dealing with rental properties. I happened to run across a website listing it for sale by the original owners and decided to give it a shot. I figured the investment in the website would do better than my negative return that my stocks have done lately
How about you? How did you come about building RentVine? Did you design it yourself or hire professionals? It looks very well done!
Kyle,
I was working on FlashAppointments.com with a partner and I was studying back links for a competitors site when I ran across RentClicks.com and figure that a rental site was a much better business model than online scheduling. So I sold the company to my partner and started RentVine 3 years ago.
I created every line of code myself - it took over a year to build. I am glad you like it.
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