State of the rental market - Milwaukee

[Marcus Auerbach]

I start to pay a lot more attention to seasonality of the rental demand and I am wondering what the Milwaukee BP comunity is seeing. Looking back this year typically I always had one single family house for rent, either because we just finished rehab or because someone is moving. Most of my advertising is on craigslist and I started seeing demand go up quite a bit in spring, typically I would get about one email a day. Not much of a surpirse demand kept going up as days got longer and in June/July I was seeing sometimes 5 emails a day and had a home rented within a week. I ended up renting a house that we just started demolition on - talk about a hot market. Now here we are in September and things are slowing down fast -  I am down to 3 emails a week. What are you guys seeing?

[Marina Shlomov]

I'm in Atlanta, and the market here is very seasonal. Towards the end of August, activity dies down for the year. Not completely, but significantly. Especially in the suburban areas where people are more organized and try to settle down before school starts. We have also structured our leases to be 14 to 17 months and most tenants don't mind.

I wanted to mention also, that instead of advertising on Craiglist, where you get probably some of the worst prospects, try Postlets.com. It's free, and it will spread your ads to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads and a few other engines where the quality of the prospect is much higher.

Good luck.