Apartment Internet Listing Services. Is there room for all the competition?

More and more sites likes apartments.com, forrent.com, apartmenthomeliving.com, rent.com, etc. are popping up every day. Curious, what does your community pay to list on these sites? Also, do you know your cost per lead from tracking these mediums? I do understand some are pay for performance but of those is there additional monthly costs associated with them? Thanks all.

Apartment Guide actually offers both pay-per-lead and monthly subscription packages. They define "leads" as connected phone calls over 8 seconds and emails. I think that's important to point out when considering the actual cost per lead because some services count stuff like missed calls and clicks to your website as a "lead."

To touch on the last question:

MyNewPlace.com is a pay-for-performance ILS with NO additional monthly costs. Rent.com and MyNewPlace.com are the only two companies using the pay-for-performance model. BENEFITS: 1) low up-front cost. 2) Pay-for-performance means, you only pay them when they find a renter who pays you. Also, MyNewPlace cites a savings of 50% compared to subscription based/ pay-per-lead advertising.

Disclaimer: I’ve worked for ForRent.com and now work for RealPage. RealPage owns MyNewPlace.com

Mark Juleen wrote a great blog about the topic. Here's a link in case you haven't read it.

www.multifamilyinsiders.com/home/multifa...ase-advertising.html

To answer the original question, when 80-90% of prospects are starting their search online, there's absolutely room for all the competition. Pay attention to which sites are working well for you in each region, as the ILSs are often the first sites to appear in Google searches, especially for the more general terms.

As for pay-for-performance, the math can work if that's the only source that the prospect used to find you. However, from our research (conducted with SatisFacts), most prospects searching online use multiple sources (including search engines, ILSs, review sites, property sites, friends' recommendations and more) when evaluating communities. Paying per lead (or per lease) is fine, but you can't assume that 100% of the lead should be attributed to that source, even if they're the one that found you the lead.

If you're considering pay-for-performance, make sure you're taking additional steps to try to track the prospect throughout the sales funnel. Lead attribution will never be a perfect science, but at least you'll get a better sense of all the different places where you're potentially reaching the prospect.

I agree with Mike 99% of the time and while I do think there is room for an ILS that is disruptive is some way, I'm not sure there is room for all competition. There are only so many spots on the first page of Google and property management companies are doing a better job of SEO and online marketing themselves so there is less room for the existing players, let alone newcomers. Further, while I am sure someone is picking up listings, the ILSs that I am familiar with have been experiencing double digit annual loss in listings for years partly because of cuts but also because people have ILS fatigue are spending the money elsewhere rather than on a new ILS.

Without a good density of listings, an ILS is of no use to the average renter and doesn't have the content it needs to get good search engine lift. Without SEO (or lots of funding to buy leads) it's hard for an ILS to gain traction. Without existing relationships, it is hard to pick up listings (even free listings). The next newcomer that succeeds will need to build relationships with existing ILSs or scrape sites to get listing content (and even though the thought makes me cringe, my guess is the later is what the next successful newcomer will do and justify it by calling itself a vertical search engine).

As far as tracking ILS leads, some companies do a meticulous job but many are not. If they all did, the average cost per lead would not be $30+ and more people would try the players that are charging $10 for leads.

The information below should help alleviate some of the legitimate concerns written about in the Mark Juleen article, “Setting the Record Straight on Pay Per Lease Adveritisng.”

Mike Whaling brought up a great point when considering pay-per-performance. Prospects making a decision through multiple ad sources and properly tracking those prospects through the sales tunnel are important when considering the cost/benefit of paying per lease.

MyNewPlace.com tracks itself as an ad source & also electronically tracks MNP users from prospect to renter, so the property doesn’t have to.

MNP is only paid when someone who leased with a property had “renter activity” with MNP specific to the property. If MNP can’t digitally prove it, the property doesn’t pay. Plus there’s no renters’ incentive program, so it’s pointless to game the system. Also, it eliminates duplicate payments to other “pay-per” sources. If Rent.com has already been paid for a lease which MNP can claim, MNP waives payment.

DON’T PAY for:
1. Leases matched to locators, transfers, or resident referrals.
2. “First-in” conflicts - instances where another source or activity predates the digitally recorded MyNewPlace activity.
3. MyNewPlace renters with incomplete/inaccurate registration information.

The above qualifying criteria touches on most of Juleen's "pay-per" objections.

Again, I work for the company who owns MyNewPlace.com, RealPage. But given its burden of proof and high level of transparency, I think it provides the most scientific model for evaluating true ROI for online advertising.

However, because there are no set up fees or monthly fees; I think it’s a great tool to supplement whatever you’re currently doing.

Keith, I hope this info helps you in figuring out what direction you take your marketing and advertising. Let us know how it turns out!

I'm sure with the growth of apartment communities using Facebook and Google Pages that these platforms will eventually see revenue potential in developing apartment listing services that operate in the exact same manner as current multifamily ILS's. And that would probably monopolize the industry and put all ILSs out of business, ha.

My New Place charades $18 per lead here and they can't even deliver the cap. They don't have very much traffic. Rent.com charges us at least 350 per lease and gives the prospect a 100 gift card when they lease. I think rent.com gets credit for other ils' leads. I don't blame the prospect though, I would do it too. I would much rather pay for a subscription with an ILS that performs than a PPL (lease or lead) model. If they bring 100 leads to you a month and you don't close 3% of those. You might want to get a new leasing staff.

I heard that My New Place feeds listings to Apartment Guide and pays them for every lead received.