There are a growing number of search sites and apps where tenants go to find rental properties. We listed the top 10 rental search sites and rental apps below. These are sites where you must advertise your rental properties at for maximum exposure.
Marketing tip: Whether you have a single rental or a whole inventory you manage, you need to have an easy way to publish your listing to many websites and rental apps and to update them at once should the rental become unavailable. Using rental syndication services like RealBird is one way to accomplish this. RealBird advertises your rentals automatically on dozens of top sites including the ones mentioned below and many other.
1) Zillow
The largest real estate and rental website is Zillow, ranking as number 1 in the real estate category according to similarweb.com with over 191 million visitors in the last 6 months. While many are searching for resale properties and using Zillow’s free estimation tool, Zillow is a top destination for tenants as well. Zillow’s rental app is #26 in the lifestyle category in Apple’s App Store.
2) Trulia
Part of the Zillow Group, Trulia’s website and apps follow closely Zillow’s lead. With over 52 million visitors in the last 6 months, Trulia is ranked as the top 83rd website in the USA overall and number 4 in real estate category. It is a must have destination for rental advertisements.
3) Apartments.com
With 27 million visitors last 6 months, Apartments.com lands on our list at number 3 position. They are part of various residential and rental websites owned by Costar, including ApartmentFinder.com, FindRent.com and Apartamentos.com (in Spanish). Absolutely a must have as a rental marketing destination. They state that across all of their websites, there are over 19M unique visitors per month.
4) Trovit
Trovit operates in dozens of countries and they are specialized in housing, car and job ads. And they are big. SimilarWeb reports over 24 million visitors in the last 6 months, with USA and Russia leading the traffic chart. Since these visitors may search for resale properties, jobs or cars, it’s hard to tell how much of their audience is rental seekers, but their mere size and being a top 5000 site world-wide makes it a top rental advertising destination in our opinion.
5) Rent.com
With over 9 million visitors, Rent.com is one of the top rental search sites in the USA. It ranks at #46 in the real estate category, with most of its traffic coming through Google and other general search engines, according to this traffic insight.
6) Hotpads
Hotpads was the original rental search engine, before it became part of the Zillow Group as well, joining Trulia and StreetEasy. They have been providing rental information since 2005 and with over 8 million visitors since last October and focus on urban rental properties, they are one of the most important rental search engines still. Within the Zillow group, they are the core group responsible for distributing rental properties among Zillow’s different websites and properties.
7) Zumper
Zumper was founded only a few years ago, but it quickly became one of the top destination site and app for tenants and landlords. It 2017, it partnered with Facebook and now feeds rental listings to Facebook Marketplace. With over 5 million visitors according to SimilarWeb and with rental distribution to Facebook, Zumper is one of the most important rental destinations today.
8) ForRent.com
Another rental search, owned by Costar, ForRent.com had close to 4 million visitors in the last 6 months, mainly from the USA, Canada and the UK.
9) Mitula
Another classified site with international distribution is Mitula. While their main audience is in Spain, 10% of their traffic is USA based so we highly recommend them for your rental listings.
10) Oodle
Oodle is a general purpose marketplace and classified ad site, now owned by QVC. They have attracted over 2 million visitors in the last 6 months and their rental search section is very popular.
+1 Craigslist
Craigslist doesn’t need introduction. It’s one of the top website in the world and has been around for ever. Unfortunately, they don’t allow automated rental listing syndication so one has to create classified ads manually. For this reason, we listed them as last, but needless to say, rentals should be posted on Craigslist.
What rental marketing tools should you use?
Besides the list above, there are many other sites and apps, RadMap, Casalova, LiveLovely, Rentals.com and so an and managing rentals across all of them is hard for even one listings, let alone a whole inventory of rentals. And this is where 3rd party rental distribution services come to play. Rental listing syndication is type of service that helps you scale your advertising. You can manage your rentals in one place and your listings are automatically sent to rental search websites and apps, with one click.
If you are interested in automating your rental marketing, we recommend RealBird rental listing syndication service. They provide real estate marketing for resale properties and rentals as well and have been doing it for close to two decades. You pay a flat fee of $30 per month with no contract and you can market and syndicate as may rentals through their platform as you’d like.