New to Rentalutions: Updated Listings Interface and Lead Management Capabilities!
by Ryan Coon
At Rentalutions, we are dedicated to helping landlords save time managing their single family homes, apartments, condos and multi-family buildings. One of the ways that we help rental owners save time is by helping them quickly and easily advertise vacant rental units across the web. In 2015 alone, we generated more than 70,000 leads from prospective tenants! That’s an average of 16 leads per rental listing.
Our secret for generating all of these leads is that we automatically post vacant rental units on the top websites that tenants search for vacant units, including Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Padmapper and Lovely. As of February 1st, we now also post vacant units to Apartments.com!
To help make the listing process even easier, we recently released an updated listings interface for landlords listing vacant rental listings. The new interface is also designed to give you an easy way to manage leads from prospective tenants and to request online rental applications and background checks. The new interface was designed with a mobile-first mindset, which means the interface functions as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop computers.
Below is a brief description of all of the exciting updates and changes that we’re proud of. As always, if you have any questions, please let us know.
Easy-to-Use Wizard for Creating Listings
We’ve been helping landlords create online rental listings for more than three years. In this time, we’ve learned what it takes to attract the best tenants. We used this knowledge and experience to build a wizard that guides you step-by-step to show off your property in the best way possible. When your property is advertised the right way, you’ll increase the number of leads you receive, ultimately giving options for choosing the tenants who are a right fit for your property.
Setting the Rent Price
Setting the rent price for your rental property can take a lot of time and research. To help simplify the process, we give you a couple data-driven figures to consider. First, is the Zillow Rent Zestimate. Zillow uses a proprietary formula to give a starting point for setting the rent price for your unit. We automatically pull in the Zestimate and show it to you.
At Rentalutions, we also have a growing set of data on actual lease amounts for properties in your area. When we have enough data to make a rent prediction, we’ll show it to you. Like the Zillow Rent Zestimate, our estimated rent price should be used as a starting point. Setting the right rent price is so complex that it warranted a separate blog post that we recommend reading.
Rearranging Pictures
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Heck yes! Our data shows that the more pictures a rental listing has, the more tenants who will be interested in it. But what happens when you upload a lot of pictures, and the featured image is a picture of the laundry closet? Well, you now have the ability to click and drag your pictures to ensure the best picture shows up as the first image prospective tenants see.
Start With Zillow Data
Zillow is the most powerful company in real estate data today. They have information on most properties in the United States. Through a partnership with Zillow, we’re able to access their information to help you get started on posting your rental property. For all properties added to Rentalutions going forward, we automatically pull in the number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square feet and photos of the property (when Zillow has this information). You’ll also be able to see the Zillow Rent Zestimate for your rental unit, to help you set the asking rent amount.
Smart Rental Descriptions
As I mentioned earlier, we know a thing or two about what it takes to attract great tenants. In fact, we used this knowledge to develop a fill-in-the-blank style formula for writing rental listings. In this new rental listings interface, we’re taking things a step further. We now automatically fill in the parts we can in the rental description and let you simply click on the section and fill in the rest. Still prefer to write your own rental listings from scratch? It’s easy to select our pre-written copy, select-all and delete… poof!
Custom Amenities… Because Your Unit is Unique
Your rental unit likely contains something that makes it especially unique. A custom amenity could be something as cool as a water slide, or as practical as a wine cellar. Rather than burying this special amenity in the rental description, you can now add it as a custom amenity. By doing this, you’ll draw attention to the things that tenants will likely be drawn to the most.
Getting it Just Right
Tired of me mentioning how experienced we are? This is the last time, I promise. We use our experience in renting properties to help you get your rental listing just right. Our software is so smart that it can detect if you missed an important or necessary part of your rental listing. If this happens, we’ll help by prompting you to include whatever the missing piece is. For fun, try posting a unit with no bathrooms. See what I mean? We’ve got your back.
Auto-Save
We’ve all experienced the pain of working on something in Microsoft Word, only to have the computer unexpectedly shut down. We lose our work, get frustrated and wonder why the world is against us. Our engineering team experienced this one too many times, and decided to use the latest in web technology to automatically save your listings as you go. This way, if the computer gods are against you, and your computer or phone shuts down, your rental listing will survive.
Half-baths Do Exist!
Three years ago, we hired a team of software engineers to build the initial version of our platform. Apparently these engineers were from Mars, because the code they wrote for bathrooms would only allow whole-numbers. On Earth, half-bathrooms are a thing, and we now let you show off the fact that your rental unit has more than one, but less than two bathrooms (and so-on).
Shoot! Can I Change That? Yes, Yes You Can
After you go through our awesome, new seven-step wizard to create your rental listing, you will preview what the listing looks like. At this point, you notice a stupid typo (they happen to all of us). Rather than having to navigate back to the last step to make the edit, go ahead and click on the title. You can make edits on this “preview” page up until the point when you hit publish.
Easy Social Sharing
As soon as you publish your rental listing, our software kicks into turbo mode to get your property promoted on popular sites across the web. Want to do even more to promote your rental unit? Well, it’s never been easier for you to promote your listing across your social media accounts. Simply click the Facebook and Twitter icons to share your listing with your audience. Wouldn’t it be nice renting to someone who you already know and trust?
Public Listings Page
You’ve put a lot of time and work into taking great photos of your rental property and writing a great rental listing. We recognize this work, which is why we’re doing our part to ensure your listing looks as good as possible. We’ve updated our listings pages that tenants see when browsing for listings. The page is designed to look as great on mobile devices as it does on desktop computers. By advertising your rental listings with Rentalutions, you’re making a strong first impression on prospective tenants.
Manage Leads, Take Notes and Request Applications
As I mentioned above, rental listings created with Rentalutions receive an average of 16 leads from interested tenants. Managing all of these prospective tenants can be tricky for even the most-organized person. To help you save time, we’re giving you powerful tools for managing these leads. From your leads page, you can take notes on prospective tenants, send pre-written messages and request online rental applications with the click of your mouse (or tap of your finger — this also works really well on mobile devices). By using these lead management features, you’ll be able to find the ideal tenant who pays rent on-time and takes care of your property. Yet again, the best news was saved for last.
This new listings interface is one of many upgrades that our team is working on now. At Rentalutions, we empower landlords by giving them access to the tools and knowledge they need to make renting easy.
If you’re a landlord, but not currently using Rentalutions, you can save yourself a lot of time by signing up here. If you have any questions, please let us know.