From what sources do you see the most tenant leads?

Question

From where do you get the most and best tenant leads to fill your empty units in San Antonio? Zillow? Hotpads? Craigslist? MLS? etc

Joseph Cacciapaglia · Answer

The MLS is our number 1 source. Of course, once you're on the MLS, you're on a bunch of other sites as well, so it's hard to know where they're really coming from. We actually get a lot of leads off of our own website as well. We have the benefit of a large inventory and thousands of past and current tenants though. I wouldn't necessarily recommend setting up a site just for this unless you had a decent number of units here.

Nick Disney · Answer

@Simon Stahl

Zillow and the MLS --

Zillow works great for all properties and it is cheap. You should have multiple people reach out each day if you are priced competitively.

The MLS is great for middle income and up properties. A lot of these leads will be working with a realtor and the realtor should have at lease qualified them a little before bringing them to you.

Craigslist works OK for lower-priced rentals but you can get some special characters that reach out to you from Craigslist.

Good Luck!

Joseph Cacciapaglia · Answer

If you want to send me the address, I'll see if I can at least see it on the MLS. Sometimes they take a while to flow through to other sites, and sometimes the are geo tagged in the wrong area.

Simon Stahl · Answer

@Maria Miers if i remember right then it turned out that the unit was not fully finished and obviously no one is going to rent it that way. We finished it up and listed it on all channels. That worked and we found a tenant shortly after. I think the reason for the issue was some miscommunication with the PM and me not pushing hard enough for all information.

Maria Miers · Answer

@Simon Stahl did you ever find out why the unit was vacant so long? Curious how you handled it. I’ve had similar issues.

Stone Saathoff · Answer

Definitely Zillow, MLS like Nick said is great for nicer areas. One of the investors I work with had a lot of success putting a nice sign in the yard and directing potential renters through Cozy to apply. If you post on craigslist I would try to set that up to direct to an application link too, unless you want to be getting calls at midnight asking if you're willing to owner finance.

Simon Stahl · Answer

Thanks for the info @Nick Disney and @Joseph Cacciapaglia. For context, in case anyone is interested: I have an empty unit in a low income area (rent ~$600) and my PM claims they have it listed on the MLS and like 500 other sites, but I cannot find it on Zillow, Hotpads, Realtor.com, Rent.com, Appartments.com or whatever else google spits out when I search for "San Antonio rent apartment". It's only on Craigslist and some other odd sites. Guess they're not doing a very good job...

From what sources do you see the most tenant leads?

From what sources do you see the most tenant leads?

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