I’ve talked briefly about using gumtree (http://www.gumtree.com) to advertise properties for rent in previous bulletins, but I wanted to devote a full bulletin to this subject because I’m a big fan of the site.
For a few years I shied away from using Gumtree because it was really a London focused website and, with the majority of my portfolio being located in North West England, I felt it wouldn’t be particularly useful for me. However in recent years, Gumtree’s use has expanded well beyond the capital and it is a great resource for most urban areas of the UK.
I’m not suggesting that Gumtree should be the only method you use to market your property but it should definitely be one of your primary resources, assuming that you are happy to find tenants yourself, because it is free, quick and easy to use and generates a lot of enquiries
As with any marketing strategy, there are certain principles that should be applied in order to achieve the best possible results. Here are my tips for getting the most out of Gumtree.
1. Before posting an advert, check out competitor advertisements
You’ll find it useful to see how other landlords are marketing their property. Before creating an advert, search the website for similar properties in the same area to your own. For a start you will quickly discover if your planned rental price is competitive with the price offered by other advertisers. Consider marketing your property slightly below the ‘going rate’ for the area to generate more enquiries.
You should also try to put yourself in the shoes of a potential tenant when looking at competitor advertisements. Observe which adverts intrigue you and make you want to find out more details, and consider using some of the wording of these adverts in your own copy. Its equally important to observe the unattractive adverts to ensure that you don’t make the same mistakes.
2. Market your property in the correct city/region
This is very important to ensure you get the best response rates. The Gumtree website organizes its listing by location (major cities and counties). Make sure you create your advert in the correct location. For example if your property is in Leeds, make sure your ad is created on the Leeds page of the website. It is very easy to get this wrong because the website sets the default location tp London if you fail to specify a different city or county. I’ve created adverts in London before instead of Lancashire. You can navigate to the correct location by clicking “change city” in the top left corner of the page.
For some properties your choice of Gumtree page will not be so simple. For example, I own a number of properties in Warrington which does not have its own dedicated page on Gumtree and lies approximately half way between Manchester and Liverpool, without being considered to be a part of, or attached to, either city. In this case your approach should be to test your advert in all appropriate locations to see which gets you the best response. In my case, I posted adverts in all the ‘North West’ locations – Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire. I found that Liverpool and Manchester adverts both delivered a decent level of response but my Lancashire listing delivered very little. I therefore now routinely post ads for my Warrington properties in both the Manchester and Liverpool pages.
3. Regularly renew your adverts
Gumtree search results are displayed in order of age with the newest advertisements, i.e. the freshest content, appearing at the top of the listings.. Obviously, it goes without saying that adverts closer to the top get more exposure.
It used to be possible to resubmit your ad without changing it and this would result in your ad being returned to the top of the listings. However this feature has been abused by many advertisers, resubmitting their adverts on an extremely regular basis and gumtree now charges £2.00 for your advert to be bumped to the top of the listings.
The way to get around this is to create a new advert by cutting and pasting the details from your original advert. It only takes a couple of minutes to do this and get yourself back to the top listing position. How often you will need to do this really depends on your location. In an area such as London, where gumtree is very popular, there are hundreds of properties being added to the system daily, so your property will slip down the list rapidly and you may wish to renew your ad daily. However in other regions of the UK it may only be necessary to renew the ad every couple of weeks – hopefully you’ll have let the property by then !.
4. Use an attention grabbing headline for your advertisement
Tenants will be scanning several adverts so you want to make sure that your advert stands out from the crowd. If you look at most adverts on gumtree, the headlines nearly all follow a similar format, along the lines of “Beautiful 2 bed apartment available in great location”. Try to think of a headline that will make people click on your advert before the others. For example a headline that I use when advertising properties that are well suited to housing benefit claimants is “House available, free to DSS”. The word ‘free’ grabs the attention of the reader and encourages them to look at the advert. In reality I am merely pointing out that a tenant who qualifies for housing benefit will have the rent paid by the government – which would most likely be the case with any property they were to rent.
5. Upload good quality pictures
Gumtree have stated that adverts that include photographs get, on average, double the number of responses compared to adverts that do not contain photos, so it really makes no sense to post an ad without photos. In this digital age, when technology makes it so simple to upload photos to a website, potential tenants are naturally suspicious of adverts that don’t include photos, often thinking that the landlord has something to hide and that the property is probably in a bad state of repair.
Make sure you use good quality pictures, and show the most attractive features of the property. Always try to include a picture of the front of the house, and two other photos of the property’s best features. Currently gumtree allows a maximum of 3 photos to be displayed.
6. Create a full and accurate description of the property
Try to provide as much detail as possible and draw attention to the properties best features in your description. This will weed out the people who require something that your property can’t give them and the potential for wasting time conducting unnecessary viewings. If you don’t mention the fact that your property has no parking facilities you really don’t want a two car family coming to view it as it just won’t suit them.
Try to include the following features in your descriptions:
- Number of bedrooms
- All other rooms
- Parking spaces/garage/off road parking
- Bathroom facilites – bath/shower etc
- What bills/charges are included in the rent
- property condition
- gardens
- central heating/double glazing
- proximity to shops and other local amenities
7. Provide email and telephone contact details
Gumtree allows you to be contacted via email and/or telephone. I used to provide only email contact details but found that I received a lot more enquiries when I started to provide my telephone number. Some people, especially the older generation, are not comfortable with email and find it difficult and time consuming. These people will often only contact you by email if they have been unsuccessful in securing a property after calling other landlords who did provide a contact number. It pays to make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you.
8. Don’t use the paid options unless you really have to
Gumtree provides a great free service but also offer various paid options such as the ‘Bump your ad up the list’ service discussed earlier and the ability to feature your ad at the top of the listings for up to 14 days. I’m sure the people at Gumtree won’t thank me for saying this but their free service is so good that you shouldn’t need to pay for these services. I’ve always been able to let my properties using the free service and if you follow the guidelines above you should too.
If you’re exceptionally busy and can’t spare a few minutes to manage your ads to ensure you always have a presence high up in the listings then it may make senses to you to pay for the services to keep your adverts high in the listings.
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