Effectively Using Craigslist to Rent Your Property

If you are like the typical landlord trying to find tenants, you probably have a small web site, a few newspaper ads, and maybe a listing on one of the scattering of apartment advertising sites. What the savvy landlords have learned though, is that you can effectively market every rental unit on Craigslist.com, whether it be an apartment, a condo, or a house, without anything but an internet connection and an email account.

Finding qualified tenants can seem like a daunting task, and sometimes discouraging to a novice landlord. There are three key elements in being successful without spending a fortune.

1) Maintain the property! Unless you're aiming for the lower economic echelon of tenants, the appearance of the property, both inside and out, is what will eventually turn the prospective tenant into a rent-paying tenant.

2) Referrals from existing tenants can be THE best form of advertising possible. Word of mouth sells, that is a well-known adage, and several marketing companies have sprung up who target that specific means for branding a new product or improving consumer buzz about an old one.

3) Effective advertising. Your customer for rental real estate is primarily made up of the 18 to 30 year old group, no matter what market you are in. They are mobile. They are tech savvy. If you're lucky, they are affluent and your rents will keep going up to reflect that. Without a presence on the internet, you are a dead duck to them, or you will be a last-resort-option, instead of their first choice.

Here are five secrets I have learned over the last couple of years on how to effectively use Craigslist to fill up virtually any kind of empty rental unit.

Do not repeat yourself! Create at least five different ads, with completely different words. And I do mean completely different words. The sniffers and snoopers will blacklist your listing faster than you can say "LEASED" if you repeatedly post the same advertisement.

Repeat yourself! Okay, maybe not literally, but you should post an advertisement every other day to keep your apartment in the 'short list' of fresh ads. Be sure to change the ad each time (see #1), but include all of the pertinent information such as size and rent.

Include COMPLETE words, do not use short-hand or jargon. Believe me, this pays off in more ways than one. People when they use search engines type complete words, not the landlord jargon meant to keep their classical newspaper advertising as cheap as possible.

Be visual! The internet is a visual medium, and you are capable of including a few graphics on Craigslist without any charge whatsoever. Believe me, the ads on the site with the little (picture) tag showing get five times as much traffic as those without. It doesn't matter what the picture is, either! But you should make it relevant to the ad, so either a picture inside of the apartment, the outside of the building, or a floor plan is your best option.

Do NOT include the actual street address of the building in your ad! Put the closest major intersection where it asks for the address. When they ask for a map, it will show them the neighborhood. If you tell them where it is before you have a chance to sell them on the merits of your rental unit, you have basically sent them on to your competitor to shop around there, too.If you follow these simple steps that have worked effectively for me on Craigslist, you should see a positive effect on your bottom-line, as well as significantly shortening your leasing cycle and lost revenue from having an apartment sit empty.