Rent.com.au is consolidating its position as Australia’s #1 rental property website, indicating in a December press release they have achieved 300% growth in the number of agency listings on their website since February 2011. They also indicate their portal has over 40,000 residential and holiday rentals now being listed by agencies across the country.
In the press release Mark Woschnak (CEO Rent.com.au) goes on to say some of their growth can be attributed to principals paying more attention to their rent rolls in these trying times, but other key factors include:
- The unique traffic audience rent.com.au gets whereby over 40% have not been to REA and over 50% have not been to Domain. This provides an effective and genuine additional and growing target market to what most agencies get via REA alone.
- The rent.com.au listing package offers excellent value for all agents, providing genuine rental enquiry and strong branding.
- The specific range of services on rent.com.au that is purposely designed for property managers, including the unique property management lead generation services.
- The high organic and natural online benefits of the domain name and branding that exists amongst the younger 18-39 year old renter community. Most importantly the brand that rent.com.au has developed as a rental solution stands proudly and clearly apart from all home purchaser focused sites.
- The extensive national coverage of listings which continues to grow.
In mid December, Rent.com.au underwent a long overdue makeover. The site has a very fresh and almost fun feel, appearing as though they borrowed ideas from US based portals and social networking sites. Mark Woschnak on the recent upgrade:
Our recent site upgrade in early December, provides a much smarter and faster search engine, more flexible and detailed search options, improved tools for renters to keep track of their properties of interest, enhanced social media communication options and the largest photo display of any major portal, all of which provide an excellent user experience.
Rent.com.au has been around for a long time and its great to see them start receiving some reward for their hard work and persistence. We look forward to their continued success!
10 Comments
Dave Platter
Great post, Ryan. It is interesting to see these niche players develop. I’m curious, do you know if they’re making a profit? Or, if not, when they expect to? I wish them the best of luck.
Ryan O'Grady
Dave, I’m not sure as to whether they’re turning a profit. I believe they’ve had backing for years so you’d think the shareholders would require some return each year. I know for a fact that many of my existing client and a large percentage of new clients signed up in droves last year. The niche factor is certainly an attraction to them.
vic Del Vecchio
Hi Ryan,
Nice snappy site. But I cannot easily navigate to Holiday accommodation. Tried a few times then gave up.
Ryan O'Grady
Search is an important feature for any portal……. lets hope their tech team are reading B2!
Nick
Minor glitch on the site. Search a postcode with a lot of suburbs (e.g. 2250) and the search results are less than pretty. You get a very nice long bold list of the suburbs in the postcode and you have to scroll a lot to see any properties.
Glenn Rogers
Lots of luck making it work on $90 per YEAR for unlimited listings.
Peter Ricci
5000 agents at $90 per year = $450k add some advertising revenues and cross selling, maybe 600k per year possibilities.
Great simple technology and server costs coming down all the time, they could break even., if it works agents would easily pay 2, 3 or 400 per annum and thats when money could roll in.
I know they invested a lot in technology initially, so it could be a winner!
Glenn Rogers
5000 agents, oh of course, easy, have it rolled out by the weekend 🙂
Real Estate Mackay
rent.com.au is really a good brand name in australia. Congrats for the growth. The site usabilty for the user is very easy.
Property Management
It’s been interesting watching them emerge over the last couple of years, I think their ‘property manager’ centric model will certainly serve them well. The introduction of these added features creates value for the agents, whereas previously seeing their ‘promote your rentals’ ads on the fax machine, most real estate agencies would have hardly taken any notice, let alone the property management department.
I agree with Peter, their subscription fee may be low – but give the clients value and watch it grow.