In the competitive market of online rental listings, it can be difficult to stand out. A recent start-up, The Rentables [therentables.com], has taken a fundamentally different approach to providing these listings and has become a cutting edge competitor within a year of its launch.
Andrew C. MacDonald, one of four partners in the company explains: “As owners of income properties, we must market our own properties when vacancies occur. After using other online rental listing services, we realized that most existing rental websites are just not making the process easy and effective. The Rentables aims to make it very simple for landlords to post and manage ads for one or multiple units through a very streamlined process. We’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours designing the page flow to make our site as intuitive and fast as we can. There are some very neat features such as interactive filters and side-by-side unit comparison, which not only help tenants in their selection, but also helps landlords determine fair rents for their property.”
The Rentables gives landlords a choice of whether or not to create an account, keeping the posting process very quick. Landlords appreciate this approach and over 48,000 listings have been posted throughout North America. In addition to the listings posted directly to TheRentables.com, visitors can browse thousands more listings from numerous partner sites, which provides a comprehensive selection of rental properties for tenants.
“We have created a website that offers an improved experience for both landlords and tenants, and best of all, it’s free” states Mr. MacDonald.
Incorporated in August 2009, The Rentables now serves thousands of visitors each month. Andrew believes that traffic will continue to increase significantly over the next six months as more and more people continue to become familiar with the benefits that the site offers to both landlords and tenants.
