Brent Davies » Testing

Testing Edmonton Rental Websites

Brent Davies — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:24:33 +0000

As a Landlord in Edmonton, finding the great tenants during the busy summer rental season is a must. With the economic slowdown and the increased vacancy in Edmonton, it time to check our rental tools.

The Edmonton Journal Classified section, the traditional place to advertise the rentals, has shrunk from 2 full pages a few years ago to less than 1\2 page today. So where and why have the advertisers moved to?

Our rental market in Edmonton is from May to September 10. The phone stops ringing in the fall after the 10th of September. June and July are hot rental months. August is desperation time for students, as they struggle to find a place for the school year. New families moving to town want the kid’s school settled before start of school in September.

Advertising for tenants on the internet has become a big business over the past five years. What worked yesterday is not working today.

This is the 2nd year of our testing of websites. Last year was only 4 sites. This year was 9 sites in the first trial.

The primary purpose of the test is find out what sites tenants are responding to. Internet ads are a great way to measure your results and if done correctly, test different ads and methods.

The first test used the same townhouse in northeast Edmonton. 3 bedrooms. Small pet allowed and above market rent listed and a suggestion of a rental incentive was in the ad.

9 ads, all the same, with 9 different email address to reply to.

The address was in the ads, but no signs were on site, as the property was under renovations at the time.

Email responses gave us a method of measuring the number of results from each rental website. We also obtained the time, day and date of response. Geographic location of the email sender was possible in this test, but not recorded. A gmail account can be from anywhere. Shaw.ca is usually Alberta.

The first two weeks worth of results from the test:

It is very disappointing the lack of responses, and the test data is from a small sampling of potential rentals. This leads to an important question.

How do you stand out in the sea of ads?

After reviewing the data received, a number of questions were raised, and more research is needed for the next series. One very interesting point was the lack of weekend calls. Do many prospective tenants search for rentals at work? As an employer, do my employees search for things on the internet on company time? Do tenants phone first or email on a good property? How many clicks or views before a response to ad? Cost of website vs responses? What headline works best?

The responses are all during business days, and during working hours. Traditional calls were after 4 pm and the weekend. Is this a new shift or bad data?

Several years ago, I observed a shift when advertising in the Edmonton Sun, a tabloid newspaper in Edmonton that caters to the “younger crowd” I was advertising lower end apartments in the paper, and was receiving calls the morning. I was theorized that guys at the shop coffee room were reading the paper and calling the ads. Same at lunch time. Whenever I have visited a industrial plant, and look in the lunch room, there are several copies of the Edmonton sun, but no Journals. It could be the sunshine girl, and the guys just read the articles. More marketing questions.

Not enough data to make a statement, but enough to ask some very interesting questions.

Drowning in a Sea of Ads

Brent Davies — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:00:54 +0000

How does a tenant find a place in the big wide sea that is now the Edmonton rental market.

10 years ago, we only had the Edmonton Journal, the Edmonton Sun, and the Home Renters Guide. No internet.

4 years ago, Rent Edmonton and Rentfaster were available, and were very good at attracting the tenant moving to town.

This spring, I cannot find the new out of province tenants. Now there more than 25 public rental websites available for an owner like myself. I decided to test 9 sites this month.

The problem is which sites work and shows results. Here’s a bunch of them and how many rental ads they have.

Kijiji.ca: 7454

RentEdmonton.com: 628

Rentfaster .ca: 690

Gottarent.com: 107

Viewit.ca: 141

Rentboard.ca: 444

Hometrader.ca: 710

Criagslis Edmontont: 1210

Edmontonsun.ca: 53

The Edmonton Journal Classified section was over 2 pages just 3 years ago. Today it is less than half a page. What a shift. Seems everyone has gone from the Journal to Kijiji.

With 7400 ads, how do you stand out? The top of page 2 is only 2 hours old and a 24 hours old ad is on page 12.

Landlords must be busy rewriting their Kijiji ads every 2 hours to keep them fresh. Do Tenants look that far back in their search?

My internet guru says that if you are on page 2, your are dead. So Kijiji may be a bust for me, but time will tell. What is the current attraction? The cost if free, but if you posting every day, is it really free? What is your time worth?

Many sites allow the tenant to locate a place geographically, and price and size, but not Kijiji or Craigslist.

And I have not yet mentioned the topic ” quality of tenant”.

Where to Advertise Rentals – Final Results

Chris Davies — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 06:03:54 +0000

This is part two of our experiment testing several Edmonton apartment rental sites.

(If you haven’t already seen them, you might want to check the week one results and our ongoing list of some other popular sites where you can list your Edmonton, Calgary and Kelowna properties for rent.)

This is actually almost three weeks worth of data. After this we put the calls all back into our normal system and put the four cell phones to other uses. A big thanks to Keely and Brent for taking the time and initiative to make this experiment work. Really, really big thanks to Keely, who is an organizational miracle.

As you’ll remember from Week 1, we were advertising a nice 2 bedroom apartment in March 2008. We ran identical ads with only the email and cell phone number offered as a contact. We used unique contacts for each site. One of the reasons I reported four rental sites with the first week’s data was that we only recieved hits from four sources.

Here’s the final results, in no particular order:

(Click on the picture to see it full size)

Site	Emails	Calls
Alberta Rent	2	0
Gotta Rent	3	40
Rent Edmonton	2	33
Rent Faster	1	20
Home Rent	1	2

What sites work for you folks? Where do you look for price comparison? Where do you advertise?

Originally posted on Chris’ Edmonton REIN Blog.

Advertising for Your Edmonton Rentals – Week 1

Chris Davies — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:58:03 +0000

In March of this year, the rental market was slow in Edmonton, and we tried a few experiments to help pick up the pace. Over the course of one month, we started playing with our advertising to fine tune it.

Internet sites change quickly, and what worked last year was not working this year. The number of calls was way down. What was wrong? Winter in Edmonton is traditionally slow.

Starting with 4 email addresses, and 4 cell phones, each with voice mail, we were able to track the number of calls, time and area code. Email responses do not tell us where they originated from geographically, but area codes can be in interesting source of information.

So we started in Week 1, with a 2 bedroom garden apartment. We ran 4 identical ads with only the email and cell phone number offered as a contact. We used unique email and cell phone combination to go with each internet site

The Response

Site	Emails	Calls
Alberta Rent	2	0
Gotta Rent	0	7
Rent Edmonton	1	5
Rent Faster	0	0

Stay tuned for the results from the rest of our experiment.

Brent Davies

Property Manager
The King of Eastwood (82nd Street)
Davies Management & Realty Ltd.

Originally published on Chris Davies’ Edmonton Investor blog.