social media ads to market your rental?

[Brynne E. Travis]

Does anyone do paid advertising on social for their rental properties? Because ads are targeted, is it legal due to fair housing act? 

We have had our cottage listed for 15 days, have had 10 calls - 2 showings so far, 4 more scheduled this week and no applications 

[Chris Seveney]

@Brynne E. Travis

In order for social media ads to be effective you have to spend a decent amount of $ and it has to be over a period of time. Also your target audience has to be very selective.

If you do it right, it typically is not cheap.

[Nathan Gesner]

Quote from @Brynne E. Travis:

We advertise on facebook for free, no paid ads. The truth is, most of the leads on facebook are useless.

[Mark Eskeldson]

We have used Zillow ads to market our rentals for 2-3 years now.

They used to cost $10/week (a bargain), but now they're free.

Our usual response is 20-40 people PER DAY responding to our ads, wanting to view the property and/or submit an application. That allows us to choose the best applicant (out of 80-100) and still rent the property quickly.

FYI- CraigsList ads are free, response is good, but quality of people/renters there is pretty bad - so we stopped using it. 

[Brynne E. Travis]

Thanks Mark, do you mean the listing is free? Or is it an actual ad? We do have our unit on Zillow as a listing, but not a targeted ad. 

Quote from @Mark Eskeldson:

We have used Zillow ads to market our rentals for 2-3 years now.

They used to cost $10/week (a bargain), but now they're free.

Our usual response is 20-40 people PER DAY responding to our ads, wanting to view the property and/or submit an application. That allows us to choose the best applicant (out of 80-100) and still rent the property quickly.

FYI- CraigsList ads are free, response is good, but quality of people/renters there is pretty bad - so we stopped using it. 

[Brynne E. Travis]

Thanks Nathan!

Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

Quote from @Brynne E. Travis:

We advertise on facebook for free, no paid ads. The truth is, most of the leads on facebook are useless.

[Mark Eskeldson]

Zillow "listings" are free, that's all we use.

You can pay for a "Premium Listing" if you want, but we have not done that. We get a fantastic response every time using their free listings (20-40 people a day and we're not in a major city).

Free listings and Premium Listings show up in the same place, the only difference is that Premium Listings show up on top of the free ones. Serious shoppers are obviously scrolling through ALL the listings, hoping to find the "perfect home."

[Justin Gabriel]

We've had great success with Zillow after flopping on Craigslist, Facebook, Apartments.com, etc. It's extremely easy to search and apply on the tenant-side, which might be why we received so many applications so quickly.

As a marketer by trade, we did not do social ads (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) for our rentals because I wanted to focus our limited budget on people who were active in their search for rentals (e.g. on Zillow, Craigslist, etc.). If someone is scrolling on their Instagram feed, serving them an ad does not guarantee that they're actively searching for a rental regardless of the type of targeting that was set up. I know others have had success with social ads for rentals, but as small independent landlords, we got a much higher ROI going straight to the source e.g. Zillow.

[Melanie Thomas]

Zillow and our website. Video tours have also helped us out! Happy investing!