After all these years, it finally looks there's a serious challenger in Zillow to Craigslist domination. There's just too many spammy scams on Craigslist now and enough people have started to use Zillow that I think the tide has turned with most of my responses are coming from Zillow now.

By now, I think I've figured out how to market a rental on Craigslist. But, if Zillow has become this important, then its necessary to write killer ads on Zillow too.

But, I'm running into a couple of issues that I wonder if anybody here has figured out yet:

1) How do you make the Zillow description more readable?

On Craigslist, I could add enough html so that there would be blank lines between sentences and bullet points.

But, even though I transferred over the Craigslist code to Zillow, the Zillow description is just 1 big blob of unreadable text.

It looks like most Zillow listings share this same fate, but then I also saw one ad that was able to keep spaces in between sentences and used graphic icons to tell you about parking, pets, etc..

2) How do you refresh a Zillow listing so that it appears higher on new listings?

If your Zillow listing is old enough to fall back on the 2nd page, the response drop significantly. On Craigslist, you could just delete the listing and repost the ad.

3) Can you write two separate ads, one for Zillow and one for Trulia?

Right now, Zillow owns Trulia and it will automatically send your Zillow ad and post it onto Trulia.

But, Zillow and Trulia ads are different. Trulia retains the html code I used for Craigslist so that the Trulia ad was more readable with space in between sentences and with bullet points. That same ad was just 1 big block of text on Zillow.

Since more people are using Zillow than Trulia, I had to write the ad so that it was geared more towards Zillow readers by shortening the ad and deleting a lot of text. At the same time, I had to keep references to lease terms, pets, and security deposit in the text even though there's a separate section for that on Zillow because there's not that same section on Trulia.

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