Rent Cafe Website

Curious to see if anyone uses or used to use Rent Cafe for their website. We currently use Rent Cafe for a few of our properties' websites, but we are considering creating our own custom websites with something like Wordpress or Wix.com. We use Yardi for everything else - property management, accounting, leasing, etc. If we do switch our websites to our own custom sites, we'd like to continue to use some Yardi features such as having the application online, showing real-time availability, etc. Does anyone know if it's possible to do this? Any feedback about the pros/cons of using Rent Cafe or having your own custom site with Wordress or Wix.com would be greatly appreciated! Our main reasons for considering switching is to have more flexibility and more control over things like SEO.

Rent Cafe is a merchandising tool, no different in promotional concept than more well viewed on line marketing vehicles.
The difference is less exposure (hits) than Apartment.com or Apartment.com etc., but as you noted integration/application process along with detailed unit availability features etc.
Just as on the other vehicles a user can have a llnk to their own web site. Typically with most of my clients using Yardi I incorporate all three: high exposure national online, medium exposure Rent Cafe and development site.
Best not to consider same an "either or" decision unless budgeting dictates same.
As a basic generalization individual web sites have fewer ifirst viewed looks than the national vehicles. Albeit not perfect, Google Analytics will give you a feel once up and running. If doing your own, Go Daddy also provides view data.

RentCafe has a lot more customization than you think. If you know basic HTML you can make a lot of changes to a RentCafe website.

Here is my pros & cons list for each when it comes to SEO:

RentCafe Pros

- Easily implement any conversion tracking or SEO tags without a developer
- Schema is automatically implemented on a RentCafe site, this would be harder to do on wordpress/wix
- SEO dashboard covers the essentials
- Rent and floor plan information is automatically integrated with the website and all ILS sites (huge pro)

Rentcafe Cons

- UX is a big part of SEO, and rentcafe's website templates don't impress me much. This can be a bit of a bigger con because you want people to stay on your site as long as possible
- Like I said, if you know basic HTML you'll be able to customize more, but if you don't then you'll find it hard to change certain things about a rentcafe site (like a simple heading on a page).
- Rentcafe's website builder does not have good UX, much more significant learning curve than wix which is much more obvious.

I didn't talk about wordpress much because you need to hire a developer to get a proper wordpress website, and I wasn't sure if you had access to one.

I think the biggest drawback from using rentcafe is the lower UX potential, but aside from that I think the pros outweigh this con.

Hope that helps! I have experience setting up RentCafe, wix, and wordpress sites for clients. If you have any questions feel free to email me at [email protected]