Where Can I Advertise My Rental Property for Free?
Searching for an experienced partner to manage your rental property? Palmetto State Properties is known for their ability to manage, market and maintain rental properties in the greater Charleston, SC area. Contact us today.
Why Is Advertising Rental Properties Online Critical?
Anyone who owns rental properties knows that vacancies are bad for business. The longer it takes to rent a vacant apartment, the higher the cost to the landlord. Today’s renters rely largely on online listings to find their next apartment. That’s particularly true for millennials, 90% of whom rely almost exclusively on searching online for a suitable rental unit.
Why Free Listings Aren’t Always the Best
The old adage you get what you pay for applies to most of the listings we have put together for you below. The free options often don’t vet those applying for your properties which can have knock-on effects later. A reliable tenant is crucial to the health of your property and impacts your income in the long term. Because of these reasons and more, working with a property management company will always leave you in a better position over time.
We post our listings on over 40 platforms, both paid and unpaid, at no additional cost to our owners.
As a full-service property management and real estate brokerage, we market our homes on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), accessible to all 7000 local Realtors and their brokerages. We receive roughly one-third of our tenants through other agents whose clients are relocating to the area and using a real estate agent’s services. We also use social media sites with a large user base, like Facebook and Instagram. We understand how to develop appealing listings on more than 40 online real estate directories, including: Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, Zumper.com, etc. You can see some of our marketing services here.
Where Can I Advertise My Rental Property for Free?
The sites listed here are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more, and some of the sites included below push their listings to other sites. Bear this in mind when considering how much exposure your free listings will have. And many sites that allow landlords to list their rental units for free also offer a premium level of service that provides access to tools that can make it easier to select tenants and manage your rental properties. Find out below the answer to “where can I advertise my rental property for free?”
Apartments.com
Apartments.com has been around for more than 30 years and gets a lot of traffic, as many as 35 million potential renters monthly. And its parent company also owns ForRent.com, Apartment Finder, Apartamentos.com, and Home Living, among others, so your listing will get great exposure. Apartment seekers pay a fee that allows them to apply for 10 units in a 30-day period, which helps ensure better quality applicants. A basic listing is free, but if you pay for a premium listing, it will be featured in a large ad and appear at the top of search results for 30 days.
Craigslist
With over 20 billion views per month, Craigslist is well known, and listings on the platform have a wide reach. But it’s not well regulated, and scammers are abound. You could waste a lot of time separating the potentially good prospective tenants from the ones you might not want to rent to. A sponsored (i.e., paid) listing gets more exposure. Whether you place a free or sponsored listing on Craigslist, it’s wise to include your application criteria to cut down on inquiries from people who aren’t good candidates.
Facebook Marketplace
You can list as many rental units as you like free of charge on Facebook Marketplace, with multiple images and detailed descriptions. Like Craigslist, it is less regulated than many apartment listing sites, so be careful in screening potential tenants who inquire about units listed on Facebook Marketplace. Fortunately, the platform makes the process of responding to inquiries quite easy.
Oodle.com
Oodle, like Craigslist, is a classified ad marketplace where a wide range of goods and services are bought and sold. Your free listing will be visible to the millions of people each month who look for rental properties on the site.
PadMapper
If you create free listings on PadMapper, they will also be published on PadMapper’s parent site, Zumper, and be syndicated to Facebook Marketplace. Tenants use PadMapper to conduct map-based searches that allow them to zoom in on specific neighborhoods and use filters to exclude rental units that don’t offer features or amenities that are important to them.
Realtor.com
While you might not think of Realtor.com as a good source of rental listings, it is not exclusively devoted to homes for sale. It does allow you to list rental units for free.
Rentberry
When you list a rental unit for free on Rentberry, the listing will be syndicated to its partners, including Doorsteps, Realtor.com, Oodle.com, and Zumper, among others. A paid premium listing will give your property even greater visibility.
RentDigs
The free listings you create on RentDigs will also appear on Oodle.com, Trovit.com, Claz.org, Mitula.com, and RentJungle.com. For each listing, you can include multiple photos or other images as well as a detailed description of the unit.
Sublet.com
Don’t be misled by this platform’s name, as listings are not limited to sublets. You can list just about any kind of rental unit for free on Sublet.com or pay for a premium listing.
Walk Score
If you own more than 15 buildings and have properties that are located in close proximity to amenities such as grocery stores, dining and entertainment venues, and business centers, Walk Score may be a great site for you to list your rental units for free. It attracts potential renters who want to be within walking distance of such necessities and attractions and assigns each listing a ranking based on its “walkability.” If you don’t own more than 15 buildings, you can create free listings on other sites and have them pushed to Walk Score.
Zillow
Zillow allows landlords to list their one rental property for free, but only for the first 30 days. After the initial free period, there is a weekly charge of $9.99 for the listing, and all additional listings also carry a fee. However, Zillow gets more visits than any other U.S. real estate site and is the parent company of Trulia, HotPads, and other top rental listing sites, so the units you list on Zillow have tremendous visibility.
Zumper
If you create free listings on Zumper, they will also appear on other sites owned by Zumper, such as PadMapper. Zumper allows landlords to set minimum application criteria, while renters can search by their top selection criteria.
Final Thoughts
As noted earlier, many rental listing platforms offer some tools that landlords can find useful for taking applications and screening candidates. Some offer, for a fee, other basic tools for managing rental properties, but not every landlord has the time or inclination to do their own property management.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help.
