Free-Rentals.com experiences a spike in traffic thanks to the recent donations from several members. Their money has been used in advertising and promoting the website, which has driven a lot of traffic to all vacation rental listings.
Free-Rentals.com demonstrates that democracy on the web does indeed work, and that a smart pooling of resources helps everyone involved.
There is a “reverse spammer” using craigslist, they are called creditreport365.net. Here is what they do… When you post an ad on craigslist either offering or seeking housing… they will answer your ad with a simple 1 line sentence posed in the form of a question. Here are sample replies you will get from this spammer….
>>> Hi do you still need housing?
>>> Hi, I was just looking through ad’s …still need housing?
>>> Hey there, how are you? I was curious if you still needed housing?
>>> Hey, still looking for housing?
>>> do you still need a place?
>>> etc…
If you reply to such a reply, you will get back an immediate response such as this…
>>>Hi there, nice to hear from you. Well that’s good because I have many
places available for you in the area. What’s your exact price range?
How soon were you looking to move? Before I show you any listings I’d
like to get a feel of what you’d qualify for, we can do this by
getting your credit score. Our office has a relationship with a credit
report company to give our clients free credit reports, if you’d like
to get one through our partner go to
http://creditreport365.net/?clientID=xxx or you can get one through
your own means, just please get this to me and we can get you into
something. I look forward to speaking with you.<<<
Worse yet, they have your email captured and can now relentless spam you with their credit report BS pitch.
Bottom line, don’t reply to every craigslist response you get, especially if its a quick one liner, and if the sender uses a gmail address that includes both a name and a series of numbers.
The blog Orlando Vacation News has just posted 3 main points that vacation rentals offer over hotels. They are in a nutshell:
New start up ShopCabins.com allows you to find a cabin to rent. But for whatever reason, they also list condos and hotels. At time of this post, they have 63 cabin listings.
According to a National Association of Realtors’ 2008 Investment and Vacation Home Buyers Survey released March 30, 2009, the economy has more second home owners than ever before deciding to rent their homes to vacationers. Seems like it may be a better time to rent.
While the NAR reports a sharp decline in total second home sales for the second consecutive year, the percentage of buyers purchasing with the intent to rent has more than doubled since 2005, reaching a record-high of 27 percent in 2008.
Even for the second home buyers who do not intend to rent over the next 12 months, nearly 66 percent say the economy has increased their interest in renting at some point in the future. The report also shows owners plan to make their vacation properties available to rent for 15 weeks per year - up from 12 weeks in 2007 — and consider the Internet an important marketing tool, with 74 percent planning to advertise online, up from 70 percent in 2007.
These results are consistent with the first major study on the industry released in January 2009, PhoCusWright’s Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change, which estimates the U.S. vacation rental industry at more than $24 billion, and also projects significant growth in online vacation rental over the next two years.
The current economy has had a significant impact on the vacation rental market, and it’s a positive one! The NAR’s survey shows more second home owners than ever are realizing that they can offset the cost of ownership and in many cases profit from their second homes by renting them out. Some owners average $20,000 a year in rental revenue.
Additionally, there are two other important factors influencing the industry: vacation homes sales reached an all-time high of 1.07 million in 2006, and many homeowners also begin to rent within one to two years of their purchase because the property is not being used as much as they planned.
Because of these factors, listing and rental through online sites is experiencing strong growth. The increase in supply is being met by an increase in demand from vacationers of all types, who have discovered the exceptional value that vacation rentals offer compared to hotels! They just get more for their vacation dollars.
Hotpads began by focusing on long term real estate rental heat maps, allowing you to view real estate listings primarily through a map front end interface. It then added a “Buy vs. Rent” search feature allowing users to search homes either for sale or rent while comparing their monthly costs.
Their latest addition is to offer vacation rentals across the U.S.A. Search results can be sorted by price and availability, which show up when you hover your mouse over any given house icon.
Hotpads, launched in 2005, originally covered only rentals. It added for sale listings in late 2007. The site now lists 3 million homes for sale and 300,000 rentals.
Rentbits is a search engine focused on helping people find apartments and houses for rent, but it has released a new feature that allows users to see the average and median rental prices of properties in 4,000 cities across the United States.
Rentbits has analyzed 7 million rental entries in its database, compiling historical graphs displaying the general pricing trends in each region (unsurprisingly, few of them seem to be heading upwards). Users can choose to view averages related to the entire market, and can also narrow it down by the number of bedrooms they’re looking for (there’s also an option for houses for rent).
RentBits launched in March 2008, and is headed by ex-Googlers Dan Daugherty Tim Moynihan
Q: I am trying to upload images of my vacation rental property to Free-Rentals.com, but they do not upload, why not?
A: Here are the most likely reason why your images are failing to upload….
1) The size it too big. Please shrink images down to 900kb or smaller before trying to upload.
2) Only JPG images are accepted, no GIF, no PNG, no BMP, etc..
3) Uploading an image is a 2 step process. First, you select the BROWSE button, then seek out the image on your harddrive and select it. Then, you must hit the button to UPLOAD that image. You must repeat this step for each of the images you upload, you can NOT batch upload all 10 images at the same time.
Ms. Leena Rao has a great article about an up and newcomer to the vacation rental industry… AirBedandBreakfast.com, who recently rebranded as airbnb.com. Part of what makes the article great is that she mentions Free-Rentals.com as one of the main established competitors.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-airbed-and-breakfast-casts-a-wider-net-for-housing-rentals-as-airbnb/
Air Bed and Breakfast has a great website, slick interface and originally started out as the name suggestions, with people offering to blow up an (air mattress in the livingroom perhaps) for an extra guest to stay for a few nights.
The guest benefits by getting accommodations far cheaper than a hotel and by getting to stay with locals and live more of the local lifestyle while on vacation. The host of the airbed gets a bit of extra cash for hosting the guest, not to mention, his or her companionship for a few days.
It’s a great idea, and couchsurfing, one of the more established players in this market is doing something similar.
By re-branding, Airbnb is now expanding out to include the vacation rental market. We feel they will have a hard time captivating the vacation rental market for the sole reason that they charge a hefty 7% commission on each booking.
The problem is not so much about the commission as it is the logistics come with becoming the broker between the rental seeker and the vacation rental home owner, and dealing with cancellations, discrepencies between the features and amenities listed and what is actually present in the rental, etc..
We wish them luck, and welcome them to the VR industry.
Here is an objection we get often concerning why owners of individual websites that promote their vacation rental units will not link to the free-rentals.com website…. “I will not link to a site (such as Free-Rentals.com) that offers hundreds of competitors for a potential guest to view”.
First, for some background… When you sign up your vacation rental property listing on Free-Rentals.com, we offer you the chance to list a link pointing back to your own personal website, which further promotes your vacation rental.
It is important to note, when you post your vacation rental ad on Free-Rentals.com, you post it free, we do not try charging you for your rental listing ad. Furthermore, we give you a field where you can post a link in your ad, back to your personal website, and again, we do NOT try charging you for doing so. We also do NOT require you to link back to us in exchange for us linking to you.
Let me make this very clear: You can post your vacation rental ad on Free-rentals.com for free. We will not try to charge you for it. And your ad can include a link back to your personal website, again for free, we do not try to charge you for it. Nor do we require a donation, nor do we require you to link back to us from your personal website.
All we do, is kindly request you to *consider* linking back to us, if we link to you. There is no requirement, it’s just a request…. AND, we offer incentive, and benefit to those who do link back to us, by giving them points. You can read elsewhere how points benefit those members, but that is not the purpose of this post.
The purpose of this post is to diffuse the objection of… “why would I link to your vacation rental directory, when you show all my competition?”.
The main reason WHY you would link to us, even though we display your competition, is because it earns you 1000 points. And the more points you have, the higher up your listing appears, and the more traffic you will get, the more prospects you will get viewing your holiday rental.
Now, we do not have exact numbers on this, but for sake of discussion…
Assume Person-A with Vacation Rental Property A has a link on his website back to Free-Rentals.com, and therefore has 1100 points. Perhaps he gets 100 people viewing his listing each month.
On the other hand, person B with Vacation Rental Property B has only 50 points, because while we link to his website, his website does not link back to Free-Rentals.com. So therefore, his listing is at the back of our directory, and he only gets perhaps 10 people viewing his listing each month.
In this scenario, those who link back to Free-Rentals.com will get 90 more visitors per month than those who do not.
The question is…. at what price does it cost person A? And is it worth the price?
We can not answer this question, because it vary’s for each vacation rental owner with their own website. We will address this topic in more detail once we get some concrete datapoints established on it.