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Rental Sites, Population Requirements?

by stevo235
7 replies
Hey offliners,

So I've been looking into do some rental sites, and I have some questions regarding how large you need the towns to be for this to be a viable option. Most of the towns around me have populations of 15-35k. Does anyone have experience doing rental sites in towns this small with some good success? Please chime in I'll probably have quite a few more questions along the way.
#population #rental #requirements #sites
  • Profile picture of the author stevo235
    anybody at all??
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    • Profile picture of the author DABK
      What's real estate activity there? How many sales a month? How much does an agent make off 1 sale? Do people who look at a house for sale in City A consider only city A or are there several cities they'd consider?

      If you make a site RealEstateCityA.com and add pages for RealEstateCityB and RealEstateCityC, etc., how many people in all those cities?

      Did you look at the search volume in Google for
      condos for sale in x
      condo for sale in x
      house for sale in x
      houses for sale in x
      homes for sale in x
      home for sale in x
      real estate x
      etc.
      where x is 1 of those cities?


      If yes, assuming you're #1, you're going to get about 30% of those searches (in real life, it will be different, but it's a good starting point). How many visitors can you expect?

      How about if you only get 20% of those?

      If the site converts at 1% (not too hard to do), what number do you end up with?

      How much do real estate agents pay to advertise in the local paper? Pay per click?

      If they pay $x/click and they're average at pay per click campaigns, how many clicks do they have to pay to get a lead? Let's say it's 15. Multiply 15 by whatever they pay and you know how much they're willing to pay for one lead.

      Now, go back to how many leads can you get them. How much effort do you have to put into the project? Is it worth your while?

      Now to the question you asked. I don't have sites for cities with 15k only. However, one of the suburbs next to a city I used to have ahd a population of 12k. I never targeted this particular 12k suburb. Still, I got 2-4 visits a month. My site showed up on page 2, 11-15, usually. According to Chitika, those positions send about 0.3-0.6% of traffic. According to Google, there was no traffic. Yup. Still, I got traffic.

      I get 4-5 visits a month for other keywords Google says there's nobody searching.

      The easiest way would be to just create something, a page on blogger, and get it to the top. Might make it to number 1 just from having the right onpage optimization and 2 backlinks.

      Originally Posted by stevo235 View Post

      anybody at all??
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  • Profile picture of the author deu12000
    I don't do rental sites at the moment, but do something similar and although I'm not in such a low population area, I'm not in a city. What I do is a 20 - 30 mile radius. That gets me traffic from several towns and a decent sized population. Most businesses and/or consumers are willing to travel a certain distance for the right product/customer.
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  • Profile picture of the author Huskerdarren
    I would say less than 100,000 people in an area is a hard sell. But, it does not matter where you are. Go ahead and set it up in a city in the next state over if you have to. Proximity to where you are means nothing.
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  • Profile picture of the author Virtualghost
    Interested to see your site you come up with.Where you located?
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    • Profile picture of the author stevo235
      I'm in massachusetts, I was thinking of probably starting with trades like plumbers, electricians, hvac, framers, hair salons, stuff life that. What I was kind of planning on doing is setting up the sites, doing Adwords get a few leads and give them away to a few businesses, or give someone like a 3-4 days test run where I'll forward the number on my rental site to there phone number, and setup the whisper so they know the calls are coming from me. Do you think it's a bad idea to do like a county and just have the website named after that? www.xxxxcountyplumbing.com Then advertise to the 6-7 towns that make up the county with adwords. I need money quick so I kind of what to be able to build these quick and try to rent them, I don't want to wait for the organic rankings. As long as I can get them leads right away with Adwords I'm sure they will be happy.
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