With the sluggish economy, there has been an increase in search queries for cheap apartments for rent. This of course makes sense as individuals and families are looking for less expensive places to live.

We recently go back from Orlando looking for rental properties to buy. The Orlando houses for rent market is completely saturated. Over the past year, this has meant great prices for investors.

The rentBits blog wrote a post about the rental and occupancy rates and why they are down in some markets. The top 4 reasons on why these two are dropping are:

1. The Shadow Market
2. Conversions
3. Migration
4. A decrease in Salaries

We are going to start to add more rental related tips and news to a new Rent Marketer blog. There is not much there but we hope to continue to add relevant content and news for the rental space.

Our rental search engine, rentbits.com, has been growing each month since launch. We recently wrote about the top cities in which Google Analytics tracks the cities and traffic for rentbits. It can be found here. 

At Rent Marketer we have a lot of property managers as advertisers. We wanted to experiement with a property management directory where we give real estate investors or anyone looking for property managers one place to find property management service. 

Rent Marketer has released a new blog called rentalscams.org that aims to educate renters, property managers, owners and agents on the many different types of rental scams that are out there.

Please write to us if you have an rental scam stories.

At rentbits.com, they are constantly searching the web looking for available rental properties. They now have over 400,000 active rental properties consisting apartments, houses, townhomes and condos for rent.

If are you interested in getting your listings into rentBits.com, please submit them.

As you might have guessed, apartments for rent listings that have at least one photo, drive more rental inquiries than listings with no photos.

We see this on the rental side as well as the for sale side. The Sellsius blog recently wrote about Point2 Technologies research on photos for the for sale market.

They found that "the study of 100,000 active listings over the first quarter of 2008 did confirm that listings without photos generated virtually no buyer interest."

the rentBits.com blog did a very creative collage of over 130 real estate web 2.0 logos and made them up as Ben Bernankes face. They used open source software to create the look of Ben Bernanke. It is a fun project. Go take a look at it here.

Google trends shows that houses for rent is out pacing apartments for rent in terms of searched traffic. Below is the most recent google trends data for these two search words.

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Dave Dugdale of RentVine.com. He just launched a new property management research site and I was the first video. You can view the here.

Our sister company, rentBits.com now has over 1000 active houses for rent in Boise. Rental properties in Boise have been in large demand and continue as the for sale market continues to take a slide.

The average rental rates in Boise for single family homes is around $859 per month.

The rental market in Phoenix is picking up. We are seeing many more renters searching for houses for rent in phoenix across our network of rental sites.

In fact, on average we are seeing about 25 phone and emails being generated for each property that is on the rental market in Phoenix.

The average rental rates in Phoenix are also strong:

Average Rental Rates in Phoenix is $1338

1 bedroom - $778
2 bedroom - $1104
3 bedroom - $1316
4 bedroom - $1623

Our Sister site, rentBits, recently launched a free average rental price tool for renters looking to find the average rental price of rental properties anywhere in the United States.

The average rental rate tool searches the web and rentBits data to find the average rental rate of more than 18,000 cities in the United States.

rentBits also offers this free average rental rates widget to anyone who wants to add this to their site.

Below is an example of what the tool looks like:

Apartment Marketer launches with a new look and new pricing. After months of testing and feed back from REITs, Property Managers and Owners, Apartment Marketer has launched a new innovative pricing program for apartment communities looking to fill their vacancies faster.

Apartment Marketer’s solution. We offer a hybrid pricing model that has the benefits of the subscription model and cost per lead model.

Apartment Marketer’s pricing is the most unique in the industry. Here is how it works:

• Communities post their floor plans for free and Apartment Marketer posts those floor plans to over 60 Rental and Classifieds Sites
• Communities only pay when a phone or email lead is received.
• Once a community receives 4 leads, all leads after that are free (This ensures a community never pays more than $100 per month per community

We are very excited to announce a new rental search engine called rentBits.com. We launched it earlier this week and we have been busy interviewing with the press.

We have indexed hundreds of thousands of rental listings including rental homes and apartments. You can search for homes for rent in denver, rental houses in phoenix, or anywhere else in the United States.

We will continue to add listings to the index, search functionality and other great features to help renters find the perfect rental house.

Read my thoughts on why I think homes for rent will surpass apartments in Google search queries in 2008.

It is finally here. You can now receive free ads when you refer someone to use the Rent Marketer Service.

Friends and Colleagues Referral Program

Enjoy yet another benefit of RentMarketer.com!

Invite your friends and colleagues to join RentMarketer.com and receive a free ad when they sign up and pay for an ad!

It is as easy as 1,2,3!

• Think of people that might benefit
• Go to the referral form here
• Fill out the form for up to five friends and/or co-workers and click submit!

Now just sit back, relax and once they sign up and post an ad, we will send you a voucher for a free ad!

In the coming days, weeks and months, we will be announcing new products and services that will continue to be unique in the market place.

Our engineers have been drinking lots of redbull and coffee to roll these products out. We are extremely excited and we know the market place will be too.

Stay tuned.........

Oh yeah, if you know any great engineers who love challenges and building great tools, send them our way. We are always looking to hire talented people.

Dave Dugdale from RentVine did a great piece on buying links. This video actually played during the paid links session at SES. RentVine is a site where users can find homes for rent.

Dave has done a great job of ranking his RentVine site on the first few positions of Google. RentVine is also a partner site that Rent Marketer posts our clients ads on.

I am very excited to announce a new addition to our team. I know this person very well as we worked together at Google many years back.

Tim Moynihan joined us today as Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Tim brings to Rent Marketer a tremendous amount of experience and industy knowledge. Tim, welcome aboard.

DD


The entire press release can be found below:

------------------------------------

(September 4, 2007) Rent Marketer, Inc., an online marketing provider for property managers and real estate investors, announced today that Tim Moynihan has been named Vice President, Sales and Marketing.

Moynihan brings over 12 years of Internet sales and operations experience to Rent Marketer.

Most recently, Moynihan founded the Mountain States operation for Google where he was responsible for sales, marketing and strategic planning. While at Google, Moynihan built a highly successful regional sales and operations team that increased revenue from $1 mil to $100 mil in under 4 years of operation.

"Tim is exactly the right leader for Rent Marketer" says Dan Daugherty, CEO. "At Google, we evangelized the benefits of online advertising and marketing to the marketplace, helped clients create effective and accountable search marketing programs, and built a world class team that focused on delivering exceptional customer service. At Rent Marketer, Tim will help continue this tradition."

Prior to Google, Moynihan was VP of Sales at Winstar Interactive Media, a major independent website representation firm, where he led the national sales and operations organizations.

To learn more go to www.rentmarketer.com.

style="font-weight: bold;">About Rent Marketer Inc.

Rent Marketer has the largest distribution network of rental sites on the net. Rent Marketer has grown into one of the leaders in rental lead generation for real estate investors and property managers. With one click, Rent Marketer posts vacant property ads on many different rental-related websites.

There is a great post written by Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners that I wanted to summarize:

Ad Networks: Why it’s better than ever to be a targeted content site

1) The longtail is getting longer (Compete data shows a 77 percent increase over the last 5 years of unique domains visited.)

2) The head of the tail is also growing in size (Compete data shows a 29 percent increase over the last 5 years of top domains visited as % of all internet pageviews.)

3) There is a growing need for ad networks

A recent report by Collective Media found that

•   66% of advertisers plan to increase their usage of ad networks in 2007
•   88% of respondents planning to use online ad networks in 2007 ( up from 77% in 2006)
•   57% of respondents believed how an ad network targets audiences was the #1 differentiating factor between networks

I recommend reading the entire post here.

From Inman News:

Top 20 real estate Web sites

Rank (July)	Web site	Market share %
1	Realtor.com	8.37
2	RealtyTrac	3.69
3	Homegain	3.03
4	Rent.com	2.78
5	RE/MAX Real Estate	2.63
6	Apartments.com	2.02
7	Zillow	1.92
8	Yahoo! Real Estate	1.89
9	MSN Real Estate	1.46
10	Move.com	1.43
11	ZipRealty	1.43
12	Century 21 Real Estate	1.30
13	VisualTour.com	1.27
14	Homes.com	1.25
15	ServiceMagic	1.24
16	HUD	1.16
17	ForRent.com	.97
18	Apartment Guide	.96
19	Coldwell Banker Real Estate	.94
20	Rentors.org	.83

Source: Hitwise

The importance of being on many sites when marketing real estate. Realogy is putting over 700,000 listings on GoogleBase, Trulia, and now Yahoo Classifieds. They realize the importance of distribution. Craig discusses Craigslist and SecondLife real estate advertising.

The papers are coming out strong and looking for ways to continue to monetize their traffic.

Google has launched print ads where adwords advertisers can now buy inventory in over 250 newspapers. Advertisers can select which papers they would like to run their ads in, enter a price they are willing to pay, and wait to hear back from the publisher on whether or not they want to accept the bid.

Some stats from NORI Research, How America Shops & Spends 2006
Scarborough Reader Engagement Study 2006:

40% of readers say newspapers have trustworthy ads - more than any other medium
85% of readers say they have bought something advertised
62% of reasers not doing any other activity when reading the newspaper

More information on the google print platform:

http://services.google.com/training/adwords/printads/print_adwords/#slide=1

Terabitz.com has launched a new service that personalizes real estate searching in a whole new way. They aggregate and crawl information from a variety of sources and allow users to drag and drop in a personalized dashboard.

You can search for homes and then get more detailed information about the area you are interested including weather, local photos, airports, nearest restaurants, etc.

Internet Brands just announced they acquired apartmentratings.com. I have had a lot of cummincation with Justin and this couldn't of happened to a better guy. Keep up the great work Justin and Katie. Btw, their other company, TenantMarket is just as powerful.

Launched in 2000 by Jeremy and Katie Bencken, ApartmentRatings.com features more than 500,000 reviews and ratings of about 60,000 apartments nationwide. The site offers renters valuable resources including rent trend data, safety information and detailed maps. Renters can also interact with one another and get advice from the site's apartment living blog.

"Since we launched the site, our ultimate goal has always been to help renters make informed renting decisions," said Jeremy Bencken, founder of ApartmentRatings.com. "We're proud that unlike most other online apartment hunting services, we don't accept advertising from apartment owners or managers, allowing us to provide completely unbiased reviews and resources on the site."

I thought this was a rather interesting study on CEOs and real estate. Originally on the iPienso blog:

A new paper by Crocker Liu and David Yermack, ‘Where Are the Shareholder’ Mansions? CEOs’ Home Purchases, Stock Sales and Subsequent Company Performance.” Key finding:

When a CEO buys real estate, future company performance is inversely related to the CEO’s liquidation of company shares and options for financing the transaction. We also find that, regardless of the source of finance, future company performance deteriorates when CEOs acquire extremely large or costly mansions and estates…

When the CEO does not sell any shares, his stock performs significantly better ex post than the stocks of firms whose CEOs do liquidate equity to finance their houses. The retention of company shares simultaneous with a new home purchase, despite the presence of an evident personal liquidity need, appears to send a signal of commitment by a CEO to his company.

Article from Inman:

Among the offerings is high-resolution city imagery, which the company calls "Gigapixel Neighborhood Views," that allow users to zoom in on particular neighborhood areas. Errol Samuelson, president of Realtor.com and Top Producer Systems, demonstrated the technology to zoom in on San Francisco's famous, winding Lombard Street from an original view that included the entire city. "We're pretty excited about this technology," he said, which is expected to be available on the site this month.

Mike Long, Move CEO, said that search technologies are integrating with social media, and, "We need to be part of that reality. When search and social networking combine that's when the leverage in our business model will be fully exploited."

Is rent.com (an ebay company) going to more aggressively go after the single family home market? This note has been posted on the rent.com site:

We have discontinued the registration and renewal of Rent.com listings for properties with fewer than 20 units, including individually owned units. This is a necessary part of our efforts to implement new services tailored specifically for properties with fewer than 20 units, and we regret the inconvenience.

A recent report from Atlas Institute's "How Overlap Impacts Reach, Frequency and Conversions" states that

"Consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher."




Jed Flower , analyst, Atlas Institute States, “Overlap across publishers has tremendous implications for an ad campaign’s performance, marketers can no longer ignore the magnitude of reaching consumers across multiple sites.”

Zillow will soon be allowing brokers, investors, and forsalemarketer type sites to post For Sale Properties directly to Zillow.com. Zillow is taking a different approach from Trulia by hosting all for sale data. Zillow is also working on a top secret service for mortgage professionals.

Should LendingTree be scared?

LiveDeal, one of our distribution partners recently got acquired by Arizona based firm YP Corp for $12M in Stock. LiveDeal was backed by Torstar Corporation and Draper Richards and recently raised $4.85 Million in a Series B funding.

Fatdoor has opened its doors. It is currently only in the SF area and will be expanding nationally. This is an alpha launch. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with the privacy concerns and adoption rate. Very interesting concept.

Article from Inman.com.

Home valuation and property marketing site Zillow.com passed Yahoo Real Estate to rank sixth among the most visited real estate Web sites in May, Web metrics company Hitwise reported this week, and Move Inc.'s Move.com rose from 11th in April to 10th in May.

Sites with monthly declines in visitor traffic include Yahoo Real Estate, from sixth in April to seventh in May, Coldwell Banker Real Estate (coldwellbanker.com), from 10th to 13th; and ApartmentGuide.com, from 13th to 16th

Source: Hitwise. Based on U.S. market share of visits -- a percentage of online traffic to the real estate category, from a company sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

This blows A9's out of the water. Check it out here.

Update. Looks like they have this for SF, Denver, Las vegas, Miami, and NYC

A great blog article written by Cory Treffiletti of online spin talks about how advertising is becoming much more vertical to reach the long tail of users.  Advertising platforms are becoming the #1 destination to reach a more targeted audience.

"All of these models signal the shift away from large aggregate audiences towards the development of solutions to reach the long tail and provide advertisers with the ability to go deeper into the lives of their audience."

"These long-tail vertical networks provide access to a targeted audience at a lower cost, in a way that is attractive to advertisers."

Rent Marketer will continue to add to our distribution platfom and will continue to be the leader in providing a platform for advertisers to reach a targeted audience of users searching for rental properties. This is truly the longtail of rental advertising.

We have been getting more and more inquiries from property managers and job seekers looking for property management related jobs. We just launched a section of our website that is powered by SimplyHired where job seekers can search for property management related jobs and property management companies can post their job postings. Enjoy.

While I was at Google, Larry and Sergey used to always say that out of 10, Google search is a 1. Even though Google is the #1 search engine on earth, there is still so much it can do to improve.

From the FT:

Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world's information.

"We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation."...."We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google's expansion."

"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?' "

I can only imagine that one day, a rental site, or perhaps just Google, will be able to have enough personal information about me, that I will be able to simply enter "What House Should I Rent?". The engine would then give me the best possible answer based on my personal data of which my wants, needs, demographic, financial status, preferences, etc are mined and a result or results are sent to my screen.

Are we ready for this? Would you give up your personal information to have a better search experience?

Online rental advertising has been increasing dramatically over the past couple of years. The rental online tools in general have been taking the back seat in terms of innovation, VC funding, etc.

Times are changing dramatically on the rental advertising side and we will begin to see more innovative tools, more VC funding of sites, more acquisitions and an overall better user experience and more content for the consumer.

According to Borrell and Associates, the paid rental advertising market is expected to increase by 57% by 2010 and have a total yearly marketing spend of $775 million.

eMarketer.com reports that online ad spending has hit a new record and there seems to be no end.

US Internet ad revenues totaled $16.9 billion in 2006, up 35% from 2005, according to the "Internet Advertising Revenue Report" from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IA and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Trulia.com announced that it has secured $10 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The investment will fund Trulia's general operations and enable the company to expand marketing and sales efforts.

Release

An article by Borrell And Associates

Some point from the article:

Real estate advertising has remained virtually unchanged at $11.6 billion. Home sales have slowed down, meaning agents have more inventory to advertise but less money to spend on that marketing. Despite the hype about Internet advertising, there is plenty of room for growth: Most agents don't even have a Web site or advertise online. Online real estate advertising will grow to a $2 billion category this year and swell to $3 billion by 2010, surpassing the longtime leader, newspapers.

What is the power of having your rental property advertised on so many sites? Large sites, small sites and regional sites. The power is you get your property in front of MORE Renters.

More Distribution = More Renters = More Leads = Lower Vacancy

A fabulous book by Chris Anderson called the Long Tail, states that the internet has revolutionized how products are being sold. For example, Wal-Mart stores currently only carry about 10,000 of the top CD tracks. These are the tracks that are most likely to generate sales for the stores.

Now compare this with what the democratization of the internet has done and allowed companies to give more choice to consumers.

Let's take i-tunes for example, they currently have over 3 million tracks to choose from. Chris Anderson states that of these 3 million tracks, 98% of them will at leased be purchased by 1 person. This is called the Long tail. That means that in aggregate, the sales of the long tail, outweighs the total sales of the top 10,000 tracks.



This is exactly how Rent Marketer works. Because of our vast distribution and reach, all of the smaller and regional sites, in aggregate, drive more leads than the top sites.



We will continue to add more large, small and regional sites to our distribution network to get our customers the most distribution and leads as possible. You will always be able to view exactly how many phone and email leads you received for your property as well. So feel free to compare with your other marketing efforts.

At the end of the day,

More Distribution = More Renters = More Leads = Lower Vacancy

Now here is an interesting concept. A neighborhood social network. They are on a mission to "improve quality of life in America while building the next generation internet company."

I was recently walking my dog down my street towards the park which I have done on numerous occasions. But this time, I ran into a neighbor I have never spoken to. We got to speaking about investing in real estate and to my surprise it turned out he is an active real estate investor with over 40 residential properties under his belt. I told him about Rent Marketer and he was very excited to post his vacant properties with us.

Now, I have lived in my recent house for over 2 years and never knew of this gentleman. How amazing would it have been if I could go to one place online and view and meet my neighbors.

FatDoor is going to be this place.  Here are some more ways the social network could work. From fatdoors blog and an article from Paul Lamb on CNET:

Here is an excerpt from the article:

What would a world look like where the best of social-networking tools were put to use in "average" communities and for the larger social good?

It might include:

- Neighborhood social networking. While sitting at home using my PC or driving around my neighborhood with my cell phone, I can identify and connect with people on my street who share common interests. Neighbors I may not know have a choice to make their profile available to me and others in our immediate neighborhood. If an elderly neighbor needs help moving furniture, I can find out about it on our neighborhood social network and volunteer to lend a hand.

- Educational social networking. Students, teachers and the community at large participate in school-based systems that match school assignments, activities or needs with individuals inside and outside the school who can help.

- Social services networking. Using a cheap wireless device, an abused spouse or a person recently released from prison can be linked immediately to a variety of services in their area, including temporary housing, counseling and employment support. Before they even show up at a social service agency, they could access information about the best person to talk to (based on reviews from other clients) and know what services are available in real time without having to wait or be told to go somewhere else.

- Street-smart social networking. Rather than handing over a quarter, a passerby can assist a homeless person using a one-click system that identifies local services or electronically transfers money to an account at a local grocery store or restaurant.

An article in the WSJ today talks about how owners who cannot sell their home are not turning to renting out their properties and have become accidental landlords.

Some stats from the article:

Accidental landlords aren't big players in real estate: 67% own only one property. They are more likely to have a full-time job in addition to managing a property: 80%, compared to 67% of landlords who bought property with the intention of renting it. Many purchased during the real-estate frenzy of the past few years: 72% have owned the properties they're renting out for nine years or less.

Accidental landlords are mostly middle-aged: 47% are between the ages of 45 and 54, compared with 35% of intentional landlords. They're also more likely to be female (56%, compared with 36% of intentional landlords).

Rents are on the rise across the U.S. -- nationwide, apartment rents average $939, up 4.4% from a year ago, according to real-estate research firm Reis, Inc.

Times will get tougher for renters over the next year: Nearly seven out of 10 intentional landlords and 55% of accidental ones plan to raise rents over the next 12 months.

At RentMarketer, we feel you should be able to quantify your rental advertising spend so you or your clients can see exacly how well their advertising is doing. We supply every advertiser with a detailed report of how many phone and email leads a specific property received.



To view leads, simply login to your account admin center and view the leads in aggregate. If you want to view leads for a specific property, simply click on "leads" next to the address and select the time period you would like to view the leads for.

Google announced today they signed a deal with Clear Channel, the largest radio station group owner in the US. The deal will guarantee inventory on the top rated AM and FM stations all over the US. This is a great first step to allow agents, brokers, property managers and other real estate professionals to easily and effectively advertise their company or product on the radio.