What are best ways to advertise a rental in Southern California?

Question

What is the best way to advertise a rental in Southern California? We're in Yucaipa, California. We use Craigslist and we just started to try Postlets today. We also use the Greensheet, which costs money. We used to use the Pennysaver but it's out of business. Are there other popular website we should consider using?

Kevin Fox · Answer

Hey @Ian Dyer

I can't speak specifically for the market in Yucaipa, but in San Diego I have found that online marketing is far and away the most efficient and effective means of advertising rentals. I wouldn't argue with anyone who said it was the ONLY worthwhile medium to advertise them on, to be perfectly honest.

We manage right around 400 properties throughout the county and use AppFolio's listing syndication (almost exclusively) for advertising our rentals. Rarely, if ever, do we ever see one sit for any substantial amount of time without being rented or, at the very least, calls/emails regularly coming in inquiring about the property.

Granted, most of the SD neighborhoods have much more competitive rental markets than anywhere else in the country, but I can't tell you how often I still hear complaints from other PMs and past/current land lords about not being able to generate interest.

Appfolio posts it to over 100 different property listing sites, hitting all the big ones like those reached through postlets, craigslist, etc.  It probably doesn't makes sense cost-wise if your only purpose for it is advertising, but its a great system for day-to-day management as well and well worth the money if you use it for both functions.

Best of luck!

Dan H. · Answer

My market is mostly Escondido with a single SFH in San Diego that has not been vacant in about 10 years (so I have not needed to find a tenant recently for that unit)

We only have 10 units but we do exactly what you did (Postlets and Craigslist).  Postlets posts on quite a few sites but by my responses most responses come from only a few of the sites Postlets posts to.  We have not had a unit empty more than a week after having it ready and we set the rent at market rate (for the last 3 new tenants we were barely able to have unit ready by the move in date (actually for one of them we had to postpone move in date by 3 days to have the unit ready)).

I get a lot more responses from the Postlets various sites than I do from Craigslist.  I have not actually done any analysis about which site actually produced the tenant.

Note 10 years ago Craigslist was by far our number one response.  Posting in the various news papers was almost wasted effort (UT, Reader, PennySaver, etc.).  My view is Postlets, for my area (Escondido), has surpassed Craigslist for tenants.

David Friedman · Answer

Craigslist and Postlets should be enough to advertise to the masses, although Yucaipa does have an older population. You may want to use a sign too. I live in Yucaipa and most people find their rental homes online. Postlets has a cool feature that allows you to generate the entire posting for Craigslist. After posting your rental to Postlets there is some code that you can copy and paste into Craigslist. You will end up with a very professional looking listing.

Tom Ott · Answer

Hello Ian,

Speaking from experience AppFolio is a great tool! It really helps you manage through all of your properties and tenants. It also offers a way for your tenants to pay online. Let me know if you have any questions about it!

Ian Dyer · Answer

Thank you to each of you. I'm new to BiggerPockets, but I can already see the value of time spent on the site. We are now using Postlets and are amazed at the number of responses. We'll look into Appfolio.

Kevin Fox · Answer

@Ian Dyer You are very welcome.  Let me know how everything goes with getting the unit rented!

As for @Doug H., I don't believe you read my post all the way through (if your comments were directed at me.)  You are absolutely accurate in saying that Craigslist is a great source for tenants, although I can't say my experiences are similar to yours in terms of the overwhelming percentage of tenants coming from one site. Perhaps it could also be that your marketing is better geared for the demographic of CL users than it is for the demographic of the other sites, but as long as it is working for you I see no reason to change.

When I said "almost" exclusively, Craigslist was the exception that I had in mind and even mentioned it by name towards the bottom of my post.

Ian Dyer · Answer

Since we had this online discussion, Zillow & Trulia have merged. Our company stopped our newspaper advertising because we track every inquiry and were getting most of ours from Craigslist and Trulia/Zillow. We're focused on putting ads into Trulia every 2 days and it's working well and I recommend it. Does anyone have other suggestions besides Trulia?

Christine Kankowski · Answer

If you dont have the syndication option from appfolio property mgmt. software, you can post directly on Zillow and it stays on there for a while.  No need to report every few days like craigslist.

What are best ways to advertise a rental in Southern California?

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