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Warning when listing your home for the Super Bowl

January 21st, 2008 by Kenric

I decided to write this post because I know a few of my readers have used rental websites to post their homes for rent.  I have been following the super bowl rental market for the past 6 months in the valley and it just hit me over the weekend that people are getting ripped off on their listings with a few of the websites.

Here is what I mean.  When someone is searching for a house to rent for the Super Bowl, it’s only natural for them to type into Google a search term like, “Super Bowl Rental Home” or something very similar.

Look at the results below.  The results in red are organic search results.  This means that they are results that naturally list on the front page for the search term.  The results in green are paid advertisements.  These results only show on the front page when the website owner pays for the advertisement.

As a home owner, you would prefer to put your listing on a website that is listed high up in the organic (red) results.  Why?  What happens if the site owner decides that they don’t want to pay for the advertising?  Their site falls off the map and your ad never gets seen by people looking for a home.

To serve as an example, I put a fake ad on the image above.  Kenric’s SuperBOWL homes is charging $10,000 per listing.  Imagine that I am paying $10 per click to have my advertisement listed in the green boxes above.  I’m happy to pay that because if someone clicks it and ends up listing with me, I make $10,000.  So here I am spending hundreds of dollars a day in advertising, but I don’t care because it’s making me even more money.  At some point I have 300 listings, made $300,000 and I decide that I’ve made enough money on my website so I cut off my advertising expenses.  My site drops off the Google map.  My local customers who paid $10,000 a listing are getting absolutely no value from my site anymore.

There were websites asking $50-$100 per listing a few months ago.  By my estimation, many of the sites had 300+ listings.  They made their $30,000 a few months ago and guess what?  They’ve decided not to pay for advertising anymore.  So now they have 300 listings that will never get seen.  This is the busiest week for people looking for rental homes and I can’t find their websites!  I’ve looked, they are not in the top ten pages.

Are you someone who listed with them? If you have listed with a rental website.  Pretend to be a potential customer and try to find the site.  Type in search terms into Google and look for the site.  Can you find it?  Is it on the frontpage? second page?  Are their ads still up?

These sites basically took these homeowner’s money and ran.  They have no incentive to keep paying to get their websites seen by the masses.  They don’t care if your home gets rented or not, they’ve got their money already.  This pisses me off so much.

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