Profiting from apartment/home rental listing site?

Just an idea I had. I've found a handful of towns that don't have websites for people to find rental properties. These towns have Facebook groups for people looking to rent, but it's not easy for them to find anything except for actually doing footwork or site-jumping to see different apartments. They are also of size that they don't use bigger sites like Trulia and Rent.com.

Do you think it would be profitable to build rental listing sites for these areas? How would you go about monetizing them? Paid listings, ads, etc?

I think for that town rental listing site is really essential. If you won't launch a site, someone else would do that. So i think it would be profitable for you.

Anyone else think it's a profitable idea? One central location for all rental properties in a town of about 20,000-30,000?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...0-make-4000-month-working-1-hour-per-day.html
This can give you some ideas. It's always profitable.

Start small then scale.
Create a beta version get these users on board. Don't worry about monetization.
Worry if their using it or not. If you start to see 100-300 visits a day with low bounce rates and people doing things throw on ads to pay for hosting and etc.
After that focus on scaling to acquire more users. Once you hit a certain amount of traction then proceed to get real estate agents/brokers on board and hit them with a fee.

Agents/Brokers do not mind paying if you can bring leads. Users bring value doing whatever you can to make there life easier and your site a go-to.
Good Luck.

jasgrey said:

Just an idea I had. I've found a handful of towns that don't have websites for people to find rental properties. These towns have Facebook groups for people looking to rent, but it's not easy for them to find anything except for actually doing footwork or site-jumping to see different apartments. They are also of size that they don't use bigger sites like Trulia and Rent.com.

Do you think it would be profitable to build rental listing sites for these areas? How would you go about monetizing them? Paid listings, ads, etc?

Click to expand...

jasgrey said:

Anyone else think it's a profitable idea? One central location for all rental properties in a town of about 20,000-30,000?

Click to expand...

Yeah it can be very profitable... I have a few that are similar to your thought process.

It may take a little elbow grease to get them ranked but it can be well worth it.

Real estate is always profitable niche. Just scrape Some listings from other big websites for a start. Possibly try to spin them. For me the problem is generating revenue from these as lead conversion is non existent here. You can only make commission from sale , which is completely impossible by selling houses on net. If you can gen leads , go ahead.

Maybe not PPL. Maybe a simple per-listing fee. A person could list a house for rent for $XX. An apartment complex could list all their openings for $XX.