Name of your website?Rentalhunt.com
Your name?
Chris Nichols
Your Location (city, etc)
Sacramento, CA
Started in 2005 to give Landlords the opportunity to advertise their rentals risk free. Landlords only pay us a fee if we actually rent their property and rental hunters get a $100 reward just for choosing a property advertised on our website.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
Rental listings in the United States with many rental properties paying a $100 Reward just for renting the property and mentioning Rentalhunt.com.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
The most difficult part of creating our website is making sure all of our listings are submitted to the search engines so they can easily be located. All rental listings use a unique Title generated using information about each rental making each page unique and search engine friendly.
What has been the easist part of operating your website?
Matching rental hunters with rental properties. With a $100 reward, rental hunters get paid for finding a rental properties. Landlords are happy because they only pay us if we are successful.
What was your biggest mistake?
The website was originally only a regional site with listings in Sacramento. The search engine was not originally designed to handle cities and states across the U.S. making expansion more difficult.
Who maintains your website and why?
We have a programmer that we use because he is very talented and makes modifications a breeze. He also has great idea's to improve the overall experience for our visitors.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
This business is only operated via the website. We plan to expand to physical locations in 2008 that will support the website which is sorta backwords compared to most businesses.
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
More people search for rental properties using the internet than the paper. The internet allows for color photo's, full descriptions of properties, and the ability to apply online 24 hours a day from the comfort of your bedroom. The newspaper only allows for a few words requiring a phone call to the landlord for more information. Plus, the newspaper ad is much more expensive.
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Websites should not be ranked based on the number of incoming links. Since everyone knows this will help your website rankings, incoming links can be bought and doesn't make your website any better than a website with lower incoming links.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
You can't live without the search engines. Most of our visitors come from the search engines so they have really helped our business.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Ad sense through google has brought us large amounts of traffic, but of course it's paid for. Word of mouth has helped promote our website but targeted advertising has helped get that started. We tried Radio advertising but it's much less effective than search engine Pay per click advertising.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
Radio advertising probably gave us the least bang for our buck.
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
The search engines need to find a better way to rank websites that are more fair to the small guy or new business. Money is basically what can buy you higher rankings or a ton of time learning the system.
How many hits does the average rental property receive once it's posted on your site?
Every rental listing has the number of views on the bottom of the page. The average rental receives anywhere from 120 to 200+ views in the first 24 hours it's placed on our website. One reason for this is that the listing is automatically emailed to those that are searching for a rental that matches that criteria. Our listings are also viewable on many other national rental websites that link to our site. Plus we automatically submit the listing to other rental directories all across the internet.
What is your website address?
Rentalhunt.com
