Here are some of the questions we were able to address in this second session, along with a recap of some of the highlights of the discussion:

Is there any downside to using Craigslist to market your apartments? If so, what is it?
(Question submitted by Tara Smiley.)

• Jennifer Kennedy: The only downside I could see if the time spent on Craiglist isn’t bringing any qualified leads.
• Eric at Buildium: You limit yourself to those that search for apts on Craigslist. Great start, but only a piece of the marketing pie.
• Carrie White: The search feature on Craigslist is not ideal … it is hard to cut through the clutter.
• Darcey Forbes: Downside is working with current residents who are in a lease and want that new price & communicating why the price is as it is.
• Sara Goberdhansingh: Craigslist is very easy to use for apt seekers, but I’ve noticed it’s used more on an individual basis, not really so much by communities.
• Carrie White: In my market, CL is viewed as being over-run by Locators and is not trusted by many apartment seekers.
• Kirstin Williams: Another downside is the time sunk on posting, reposting, reposting. Hard to track this hidden cost, does anyone try to?

Should you have the renter email or call you? What’s best?

• Carrie White: I prefer email…I have had my phone ring at all hours of the night b/c of late night surfing.
• Sara Goberdhansingh: BOTH! You need to let your prospects decide what the best way is for them to get in touch with you.
• Eric at Buildium: Whatever the prospect feels most comfortable doing. Keep them in their comfort zone, but be responsive either way.
• BakeExtraCookies: During business hours we see that most people call our users. After hours, the number of emails spikes.
• Eva Panagiotopoulos: Interesting question – Anyone using SMS?
• Paulette Barrett: Would suggest using a unique email address though for tracking purposes where possible.
• Brian Owen: We need to be able to adapt. If the customer wants to send a smoke signal, you better have a campfire ready to respond.
• Tamela Coval: Phone call Leads are a useful tracking & training tool, as well as measuring effectiveness of lead quality vs quantity.
• MyNewPlace: Around 70 percent of our users expect a response to email within 24 hours.
• Paulette Barrett: We see roughly 5 calls to 1 email response with the clients we work with.

We’ve tried Craigslist several times and it doesn’t seem to work. Does it vary by market?

• Tara Smiley: We get local primarily. We average 3 calls/month from people moving to the area.
• Apartments.com: Just speculating here… could it be because in some markets renters look more for privately-owned apts?
• DriveBuy: CL Austin is somewhat of an Arms Race. Your ad will be on page 1 for maybe an hour.
• Paulette Barrett: Phoenix and Dallas are two [of the more challenging markets.]

My boss is worried about scammers. How can you get scammed? How can you protect yourself?

• Nashville Web Design: Renter sends a big check, letting us deposit it, keep our part, and ask us to send the remainder to somebody elsewhere.
• DriveBuy: You can get scammed by identity thieves using your complex as a carrot to steal someone’s identity.

Does Craigslist help our Google rankings? Is there a certain style we should be using? What keywords should we use when we write ads?

• Ann Padgett: I don’t know about rankings specifically, but it can increase your digital footprint.
• Nashville Web Design: Craigslist has “no-follow” on all their links and does not affect Google rankings or page rank.
• MyNewPlace: Google crawls Craigslist and properties (or units) will rank on their SRPs. passing SEO [authority] to a given site is another story.
• BakeExtraCookies: Optimize your ads to come up in Craigslist searches. Use key words that have high # searches in your area.
• Apartments.com: PageRank is definitely important. However, sometimes just getting the spider to a page quickly is good too (see Twitter).

There was an interesting side conversation about the value of ads on Craigslist and ILSs in terms of search optimization for your community. ILSs have LOTS of data about this subject. If you are advertising with any of the ILSs, make sure you’re asking how they can help you optimize your ads to get the most out of them for your community. Other good side conversation topics included ad formatting, expected response time for new leads and the real cost of posting ads to Craigslist. You can read the full transcript here.

I think we’re officially worn out on Craigslist and the rest of the free classifieds sites for a while, but feel free to leave us your comments to let us know what is (or maybe isn’t) working for you. And if you have another topic you’d like us to discuss on a future #AptChat, just let us know!

“Craigslist is not for everyone. And it doesn’t work well in all markets. Not a ‘one size fits all’.” ~ Lisa Trosien

For our first chat of 2010, we decided to jump right into the deep end. We recruited the help of Eva Panagiotopoulos and Eric Broughton from RentSentinel to help us understand how to get more out of Craigslist and other free classifieds sites like Google Base, Kijiji and BackPage.

After a few technical difficulties with Twitter, we finally got things going. (Thanks to everyone who stayed with us through the fail whales!) Here are the questions, and a few of the highlights from the discussion:

How often should a community post to Craigslist?

• RentSentinel: Every community is different but we have seen 2 – 3 times per day spaced out at key posting times to be best.
• Tara Smiley: We post on average 15-20 CL a day.
• Trevor Henson: We post our individual vacancies Mon Wed and Fridays on C-list.
• Lisa Trosien: Many of the REITS have been blacklisted this year and have had to retool their strategy. They were overposting.
• Eva Pana: Key posting times vary by community, this is why we use analytics to track each community’s specific times.
• Eric Broughton: At most we have seen some of our customers post up to 8 times per day spaced out at 1 per hour. No more than that.
• Lorena Fikes: We ask our properties to post 3-4 a day is possible, spread out throughout the day as well…
• (Re: key posting times)RentSentinel: It often correlates to the work day and how people will surf the net, early a.m. and toward end of working hours.
• Erica Campbell: I notice the more people use it in a metro, the worse your results, because their listings are over-saturated with all the postings.
• Eva Pana: Spreading posting times throughout the day is a great way to test your ad’s effectiveness for various times.

What types of ads are most effective? Templates or text only?

• Tara Smiley: We try to keep the ads simple. It works for us.
• Eric Brown: We have the best CL traffic from organic looking ads. (Justin Dunckel and Mike Brewer agreed.)
• Eva Pana: No perfect answer, depends on the portfolio but we recommend you post using both methods and measure effectiveness of both.
• Trevor Henson: We find that we get more phone calls from the template listings and more emails from linear CL posts.
• Elysa Rice: The html ads generate a lot more traffic to websites because of the SEO benefits of being able to include more text.
• Eva Pana: With that said, we have a contest in RentSentinel & the last 3 winners in the lead generation category were all simple ads.
• Joe Foster: There’s no reason not to use both. I think organic caters to the core Craigslist userbase while templates are for the casual user.
• Mike Whaling: Regardless of template or plain text, always upload the photos. 3rd-party sites (like PadMapper) filter ads to feature those w/ pics.
• Erica Campbell: Craigslist only takes plain HTML and nothing dynamic so If you have video, be sure to include a URL to it in your listing.

What is a good way to engage your leasing professionals to post more/better ads?

• Paulette Barrette: I think education is the first step.
• Eva Pana: A great way to engage your leasing pros to post is to hold a competition. RentSentinel has received great results from our contest.
• Tara Smiley: I love the CL battles in our office – 5 minutes, as many as possible… ready, set, go!
• Tami Siewruk: If you give Leasing prewritten ads they will find time to post. They feel uncomfortable, training is the key.
• Trevor Henson: We combine both aspects: Encourage our onsites to post & also have office staff post up regularly.

What do I do if I get blocked by Craigslist?

• Jeff Sandell: Change IP Address.
• Erica Campbell: Start up a new email address and possibly switch IPs.
• Buildium: Easiest thing is to create a new email address, but you should try not to get blocked in the first place.
• RentSentinel: We believe and encourage being a good CL citizen. Don’t overpost, keep your ads concise, and most importantly, have an open and honest dialogue/relationship with Craigslist.

There were a LOT of great side conversations and comments throughout this week’s chat — including topics from Craigslist spam to posting tools like Vflyer & Postlets to postings by third-party apartment locators — so make sure you take the time to read through the full transcript. (For your reference, we think you should also know the Craiglist Terms of Service.) Thanks again to RentSentinel for their help with all the supporting data!

What do you think? How is Craigslist working for you? Have you discovered “best practices” that have made your efforts more effective? Leave your thoughts in the comments!