Many student landlords will now be thinking about advertising their properties. I recently received an unsolicited email suggesting we advertise our student properties for only £50 on national internet sites. We manage all our own properties, so we avoid expensive management and advertising fees. Are you taking control of your advertising?
"We've never had a void"
We have never had a void or paid for an advert. Some major national sites are of limited value for local students looking for properties. Look for internet sites that have a filter, which narrow a search to your particular county or town. Some sites specialize in finding roommates or flats. There are many sites specifically or generally available for the student landlord to use.
Some sites, such as Gumtree, count the number of hits on your advert. Others, such as Vivastreet, email you to enable you to regularly replenish your advert free. Studentbunk and Gumtree will email you directly, when there is interest in your advert. Torent enables you to save and manage your advert from one year to the next. Easyroommate will send you daily emails of people who might be interested in your property from their database. LetaLife can be seen by tenants, landords and agents using the latest mobile technologies such as 3g internet phones, PDA's Blackberry and iPhones. Many have a student property section such as Roastbeef and Torent.
Should I pay to bump up my advert?
Some will try to charge you for extras such as ‘bumping up your advert’, ‘featuring your advert’ or ‘upgrading your package’. We avoid these extras as it takes very little time to repost a new ad.
If your local university has its own housing department then they may be reluctant to advertise your independent property in competition with their housing stock. Try contacting the students union. They are often delighted to promote a more balanced view of good quality student housing to let in the area plus they may have a student housing day, where your properties could be featured.
Get one of your existing student tenants to post paper adverts on university notice boards. We put our contact details on several tear-off perforated slips at the bottom of each advert.
Start by investigating these free to advertise sites:
Gumtree.com; Letalife.com; Studentbunk.com; Iclads.com; Torent.co.uk; Freads.co.uk; Easyroommate.com; Simple2rent.co.uk; Starflats.co.uk; Vivastreet.co.uk; Classifieds.co.uk; Letmatch.co.uk; Roastbeef.co.uk; Houseladder.co.uk ; Yourstudenthouse.co.uk
Once your advert is live try doing a search for your property. You will often find that part of your advert is featured prominently under various sites in the search results. Unlike many of the sites where you have to pay for advertising!
In one search recently our property advert was listed 2nd, 7th, 13th, 17th, 18th and 28th on the first 3 pages of the search and we hadn’t finished posting our adverts on all our usual sites! Spreading you adverts across many sites is very important if you want to be seen.
Ask your tenants for feedback
We always ask the students on which particular site they saw the advert, this may influence where you advertise in future. However some just say they searched for student houses and just clicked on our advert on page one of the search!
If anyone has found another good free site to advertise their student properties, why not share for others to investigate!
Happy free advertising!Landlord insurance
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