Pittsburgh Homes Daily

Traditionally, apartment hunters must search through hundreds of listings by landlords and rental companies in order to find the perfect apartment. Tenant Market is trying to change that process to make it easier for both landlords and tenants.

Jeremy Bencken from TenantMarket.com kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions about how it works. Here are my questions and his answers.

What’s the story behind Tenant Market?

TenantMarket.com was launched in February 2007 to help individual and small property owners find renters more effectively. We first dreamed of the service several years ago when we had the insight that independent and part-time landlords were very concerned about the quality of the renters they attract. Also, we knew that some of the best renters are interested in personally negotiating deals to rent condos, townhomes and houses as alternatives to large apartment communities. So we created TenantMarket.com as a service that flips the rental market by allowing renters to share their profiles and enabling landlords to search, filter, and contact them (and then extend personalized offers based on criteria like employment history, self-reported credit, and lease duration).

How does Tenant Market differ from a more traditional site allowing landlords to post available properties?

With TenantMarket.com, you select the renters you want to receive your listing, and TenantMarket.com sends them the listing instantly via email. With traditional advertising, you post your ad and as renters discover it, they contact you, and you cannot easily create incentives or target better tenants.

What was wrong with the old way of having tenants search through the landlord’s listings?

The problem with traditional advertising is that unless you spend lots of money advertising everywhere, only a small portion of prospective renters will see your ad (since renters tend to check multiple on-and-offline sources throughout the duration of their housing search). There’s no way to know how long that will take or how many people will see your ad. If you only advertise in one location, you risk waiting a long time for the right renter to see your ad and contact you, and worse, you could be losing potential income with each day that passes.

TenantMarket.com is much more proactive—once you select the renters who match your property, TenantMarket.com sends them your listing instantly. We’ve seen a number of cases where landlords have received replies to their listing within 1-2 hours of contacting renters via TenantMarket.com.

Giving away things for free is all the rage in web 2.0. Why are you charging landlords to search?

Actually, it’s free to search TenantMarket.com. A landlord only needs a subscription to send their listing to renters. We require a subscription not only to help offset the cost of attracting renters, but also to prevent spam. Without a fee, you can imagine what brokers would do to a database of over 60,000 active searching renters.

The great thing about being able to search and see renter profiles before you subscribe is that you can see exactly who is in the system before paying for access. Compare that to the newspaper and other advertising-based systems that expect landlords to “pay and pray”.

Any idea how many people in Pittsburgh are using TenantMarket.com?

Since the beginning of the year, over 900 Pittsburgh tenants have posted profiles on TenantMarket.com (more if you include suburbs); a quick search for renters seeking a 1 bedroom apartment for $800 in Pittsburgh returned 55 current, active matches. So the renters are there and waiting to receive listings, and we’re focused on getting the word out to landlords.

In the two and a half months that TenantMarket.com has been live, over 75 landlords from 25 states have subscribed– and with fairly limited promotion on our part. So far, our top markets are New York, New Jersey, and Florida. We’re adding a sales force this summer to raise awareness among landlords in cities like Pittsburgh and beyond.

Thank you Jeremy & TenantMarket.com! Try out TenantMarket.com for yourself and stay up to date with their latest developments on the Do-It-Yourself Landlord’s Blog, run by TenantMarket.com.