Rentals.com Debuts New Site for Property Owners
Rentals.com, an online management company for the rental housing industry, launched a new system that hopes to help owners and managers better market their apartments to renters via the Web. The system -- Master Office -- allows owners with multiple properties to aggregate and streamline their marketing efforts to one central Web site.Rentals, Redwood City, CA, custom builds Web sites for its clients and provides them a unique URL. To help clients build brand recognition and generate Web traffic, Rentals blends traditional marketing with the Internet by presenting the URLs on its clients' direct mail brochures. Rentals also registers the URLs with a number of different search engines, such as Yahoo!.
"Master Office will help [property owners] rent their apartments and manage them effectively," said Vince Giovannotto, co-founder and CEO at Rentals, "and at the same time driving traffic to the individual apartment communities."
The Master Office system also enables property owners and managers to more efficiently handle their day-to-day operations, such as schedules, applications and credit reports, Giovannotto said. Property owners, for instance, would be able to display multiple property units on one Web site, he said, and schedule several viewings at a time via e-mail with interested renters.
During the next two months, Rentals plans to launch a direct mail campaign of its own to promote the Master Office system to its customer base of 2,500 property owners, Giovannotto said.
