I find myself not liking the trifecta of Zillow, Trulia and Hotpads. I'm being inundated with showing requests, but they're not reading the ad to see when the open houses are. Basically, they're not opening the ad to actually read it and are just clicking on requests to show. I tried e-mailing each one at first with open house dates, but that's just too much work. I feel most of these guys are tire kickers anyway. I find Craiglist much more effective from a management standpoint. I have a very detailed ad and the few who've had questions, I just refer them back to the ad. I'm not getting swamped with e-mails and texts either. I deactivated my Zillow ads today.

CL just fell off the table for me. It went from supplying nearly all of my leads to nothing. By 2015 I was thinking that demand had shrunk in my market, boy was I wrong!

Your area may be the exception, but I think CL will be a bit player.

I also prognosticate that the services will come and go with greater rapidity.

GKARL,

We were getting only dregs of society from CL.

We want the app first so we send a copy/paste reply pointing them to our website for complete info and app.

Time for Trulia to streamline the system so as to attract more LLs.

I use Zillow exclusively since it has the most qualified prospects at least at the higher end of the market. I've never placed an ad on CL but some of my ads have appeared there thanks to some scammers. The few CL responses I've received will never qualify.

People spend between 7-15 seconds reading ads. If you want them to know it's open house showings only put in on the top line next to the price. I also only do open houses. I receive the bulk of my responses within 24 hours since I place all ads on Thursday to take advantage of weekend scheduling. I wait 24 hours and then send a bulk email using BCC to keep their emails private to confirm the time. If I'm still receiving a lot of responses after my initial email blast I'll send another one to the people that didn;t receive the original one. Many will confirm they'll be there but just as many just show up.

Maybe it's a PA thing but I do still get a fair amount of Tenants from CL. I do have a saved prescreen script that I send to anyone that is interested. This seems to help eliminate some of the tire kickers as this requires some effort to complete.

As a side note, when the time does come, you want to die in PA since we're 10 years behind the times.

Zillow works much better than Craigslist for me. I don't receive too many response, which is fine. I'd rather have good leads. The only annoyance is that a lot of times I will quickly respond to an inquiry but never hear back from them.

So....what everyone here seems to be saying is.... results may vary!

I like the Zillow syndicate because you can only post an address once. Keeps the mega-plex apartments from posting their same ads 10x per day knocking mine to the bottom.

I put an ad in the local paper as they are still pretty reasonable 60 cents a word. I should have put the price, we got about 40 calls. It's terrible. I didn't get a qualified candidate. I blame the time of year but this is for one of the best houses we have and I was going for 750. (was getting 650. for three years) It is a two story with a fireplace, heat pump, carport, 3-4 bdrms, & 2 baths. Large pantry, separate dining room, large enclosed back porch & partial basement. I'm just waiting for a while, doing some painting of luan paneling & adding some insulation in attic.

If you read on any of the tenant forums, the tenants are encountering a lot of scams on Craigslist. It makes them gunshy. I'm guessing that the value of craigslist in any individual area is affected by how many scammers are using craigslist in that area.

Those of you requiring a questionaire be filled out before anyone will contact the applicant might be losing a lot of potential tenants because that makes you look like you might be one of those identity thieves, who are also using craigslist.

Oregon Woodsmoke [ID]: They use Craigslist auto poster. It's a software not sanctioned by CL but that doesn't stop them from using one.

RentOn - I swear we are still in the 1990's here.

The only difference is we don't answer the phone any longer with a WHHHHAZZZZZ UP. We stopped that last year

If someone from zillow asks for additional info but doesn't even provide a phone number - they are tossed into the spam can. If they are not investing time, why should I?