Zillow Rental Manager
Now that Zillow Rental Manager is going to start charging $9.99/wk per property, what is everyone planning on using? Is Zillow still the best avenue for advertising rentals?
@Wesley W. Hey wesley. Since those replies go directly to your email, you can setup an auto reply with more details. That’s usually what I do to filter out serious candidates vs spam
@Bruce Xu Funny you should ask. I tried to do that on my Gmail account, and I could not get it to work. What I tried was a filter to reply if the incoming message subject line was "(the generic one-click-reply header from Zillow)" and to send a canned response via Gmail that was something snarky like, "Whoops! It looks like you are responding to an ad without actually reading it. Please answer..(etc.)"
I'll bet Zillow has some type of filter that if their email inquiry is responded to within x seconds that it is flagged as spam or a bad email address and it does not send it through to the applicant. I'll bet you could rig something up with one of the Google "labs" they have now. I think one is a scheduler. There may be some way to do it - I think what you have to do is get your autoresponder to wait a short period of time. If you figure it out, post it up for the rest of us!
Just hit Kansas. I also post them to our MLS so it may still feed from the MLS. As far as auto-response. I have set up in Google an autoresponse. However you must make it domain not address specific... For example one filter I have all incoming emails from @convo.zillow.com get marked read, moved to a specific folder, and an automatic email response goes out to the person.
Originally posted by @Thomas D.:Just hit Kansas. I also post them to our MLS so it may still feed from the MLS. As far as auto-response. I have set up in Google an autoresponse. However you must make it domain not address specific... For example one filter I have all incoming emails from @convo.zillow.com get marked read, moved to a specific folder, and an automatic email response goes out to the person.
How did you get that to work? I set up a similar filter and the autoresponse (through gmail) did not work.
I am currently looking for a rental management software and see that some softwares are still advertising their free and can post listings to Zillow. Does anyone know if this is true, have they just not updated their advertisements yet, or has Zillow yet to charge them but will be in the future?
@Nick Pedrolini We use Appfolio, and Just got notified of the pending change. It has been reported they have started contacting people who are marketing through property management software like AppFolio, Buildium, FreeRentalSite, Propertyware, RentLinx, Tenant Turner, and other non-MLS syndication tools.
@Thomas D.Thanks for the info! I also did some more digging by calling up some companies and although their ads have not yet changed the main answer I got was that most of these services will still send listings out through Zillow, however I was told Zillow will be reaching out to users separately for payment.
It was a matter of 'when', not 'if' Zillow would charge. In 2019, they seemed hell bent on finding new sources of revenue.
This comes at an interesting time as Facebook Marketplace is ramping up. I had used both Zillow and FB for advertising in my markets. Mixed results thus far.
Unfortunately this hurts landlords who want to be proactive and start listing their units before the tenants move out. I have had success paying tenants $50 to allow me to do an open house 2-3 weeks before their move out date. Especially if the place is staged nicely.
I'll continue to use FB Marketplace because there are a lot of leads and it's free.
maybe I will increase my application fee to offset the price, what do you think
Originally posted by @Bob Denkers:maybe I will increase my application fee to offset the price, what do you think
If you are in NY, that is illegal if it's more than $20. But if you live in the United States of America, you should be fine since it's a free market economy.