The Single Family Home Rental Market
September 27, 2007 – 3:38 pmAs our first post, we wanted to do a single family home rental market 101. We could write for days in regard to the rental market but we will try keep it to under 500 words: Because I am lazy, I will refer to the Single Family Home Market as (SFH)
The (SFH) Market (Some Stats)
- 30.5% of all housing units are rentals
- Nationally about 16 million of these are vacant each month.
- About 3.7 Million of total vacant are for rent.
- There are about 4 million vacation or seasonal rentals vacant at any given time
- Top Markets that have highest vacancy rates are:
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Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI\13……………..21.2%
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Indianapolis, IN…………………………19.4%
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Birmingham-Hoover, AL\4…………………..17.2%
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Tulsa, OK……………………………….14.5%
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Ways to Advertise Rental Properties
There are hundreds of rental sites a property manager, real estate investor or real estate agent can post their properties on including many of those below (oh and BTW Rent Marketer will post on all these sites for you:
Large Rental Website News
The large rental sites that you may have heard of are probably those more tailored towards the apartment communities. Sites like Rent.com (Acquired by eBay in 2004 for $415 MM), Apartments.com (Owned by Classifieds Ventures). ForRent.com (Owned by Dominion Enterprises), etc… But what most people don’t know are the large sites for the SFH market. Why? Because this has been considered the red headed step child of the rental market as there was a perceived notion that apartments drive more revenue. (BTW this perceived notion is correct- Apartment online advertising hit $2.1 billion last year)
However, these same large players are starting to get in the SFH market. Rent.com no longer accepts single family homes and properties with units under 20 because they will be offering a SFH service that will be tailored just to these properties. Apartments.com rolled out a SFH site called RentalHomesPlus, MyNewPlace is offering a separate per month service to the SFH market, Primedia who acquired RentClicks.com, HomeRentalAds.com and RentalHouses.com has consolidated these sites into Rentals.com. RentalHouses is rumored to be consolidated by year end. Other top rental sites are RentVine.com who is aggressively focusing on the organic search results to drive traffic, House.info who also has top search presence, and many others.
