I posted this interview on my PMDave.com site, but thought people that read this blog might enjoy this one.

I just got off the phone with Aaron Hassen of RentBlurb.com. He is looking for a buyer of his regional rental site for the Orlando area which ranks pretty well on Google.

His site is done in PHP.

If you know anyone that is interested, have them contact Aaron on his contact form.

It is a little sad to see a regional site looking to sell.

Update: I just got this from Aaron:

As you are aware, your blog is highly influential and monitored by major players in our industry. With your help we have now received a number of bids to purchase our site. I’m writing today to inform you and your audience that this Friday, August 29th will be the last day we will be accepting bids for the purchase of RentBlurb.com. After Friday we will begin the process of selecting a buyer.

Just wanted my users to know that RentVine is clean of any suspicious malware according to Google. Always nice when Google has something nice to say about your site.

What would be cool is to put this in a seal format and place it on my About Us page to help with confidence for my site.

I love studying what is going on in the vacation rental space because it is so closely related to my niche of home rentals. I have been looking over FlipKey.com and thought I would put my thoughts in a blog post.

My first impression is that is has almost a Oodle.com feel to it, perhaps it is the color scheme or the filtering processes on the right sidebar - I am not sure.

But I always admire sites like this one that have the guts to post reviews about properties like apartmentratings.com does. Anytime you put up reviews you are going to tick someone off. Clearly the site is built for the person looking for a place to stay - which I think is a great approach. But you need thick skin from all the vacation property owners about all the comment you will get.

I know that HomeAway.com that owns VRBO has a rating system on their site, but the rating is based off the accuracy of the info the owner provided and not the person’s experience at the vacation rental. I know if I am looking for a vacation rental I would love to hear what others thought of it before I rented it out.

I spoke with TJ Mahony from FlipKey and he gave me some insight on the name of the site which I like:

We want to help people feel more comfortable renting someone else’s home and the word “Key” is synonymous with security… Because the vacation rental experience is substantially more personal than staying in a cookie cutter hotel, we want people to feel confident about sharing / staying in each other’s homes. As a result, we choose “FlipKey” as our name to conjure images of someone ‘flipping’ their house keys, stories and personal experiences with a rental home to someone else…. It’s all about community and trust.

I posted this video over on my PmDave.com site but I thought people on this blog might be interested on how Wendy Frenzel at A Vantage Properties advertises her properties.

Very interesting tactic.

I also did a podcast with Wendy a while back if you want to listen to it.

Here is one of my interviews with Wendy Frenzel of A Vantage Properties. I will be adding more to my PmDave.com site soon.

Wendy works out of the Castle Rock Colorado area.

Dan describes how his RentMarketer and other sites work.

Dan’s take on Kijiji verses Craigslist. Dan sees Kijiji growing at a high rate.

Who came up with the domain name Kijiji.com? That is not an easy one for anyone to remember. Craigslist is much easier - kinda like PmDave.com.

Dan Daugherty from RentMarketer sits down with me and discussed which business models work well in different rental verticals.

Dan likes the fix cost ads (similar to RentVine) for single family homes and a hybrid model for apartments.

pmDave (Dave Dugdale’s new site for people new to property management): How is mobile going to change the rental ad industry?

Dan Daugherty: I think in the next 2 to 4 years we will see a dramatic increase in GPS applications. As your users may know Iphone just released their 3G GPS IPhone. What I see is a lot of applications are going to get built for the for sale market and the rental market.

I don’t see us searching for properties any more, rather properties finding us. I mean demographically psychographically maybe I have children, maybe I want to live somewhere in Colorado. A system will know here is your monthly income, here you have 3 kids you probably need a 4 bedroom house and maybe Highlands Ranch is the best place for you to be.

Or I can tell the system any time I am within a 2 mile radius within a property that fits my needs let me know and as you are driving around you will be able to be pinged a property that matches your needs. Then you could go see it or receive more information on and you could take a look at it later on.

I think there are huge advertising implications to this on the apartment communities because now you can image you are athletic and you want a community that fits your needs that has volleyball courts gyms and like that. That fits your price range.

You could image driving near DTC (Denver Tech Center) where there are a lot of apartment communities and you can getting pinged in a one block radius for properties that fit your needs.

Now from an advertising perspective - image this - Dave I know you are interested in one of our properties or maybe you have never heard of our properties but we have a unit that matches your needs - if you come in right now we will give you half a month off your rent for example or one year free pizza or something like that . Advertising is going to change the way people find properties as well because it is going to be more targeted towards me, and where I am right now and not on my computer.

PmDave: Are you working on something like that right now?

Dan Daugherty: No - not yet - [laughing].

PmDave (Dave Dugdale’s new site for people new to property management): How is Rentbits.com coming?

Dan Daugherty: RentBits are vertical search engine is doing quite well - we launched it about 3 months ago we are seeing slow increase in traffic. We are not doing a lot of advertising right now, we want to make sure the user experience is the best possible, we want to make sure we are crawling as many sites as possible.

Sites like Oodle.com Vast.com and GoogleBase are great services that crawl all classifieds and then you have ubber vertical search engines like indeed.com and simplyhired.com or Trulia.com and that is where we want to be just focused on rentals and have the best user experience as possible.

PmDave: Who is the largest in that vertical?

Dan Daugherty: I think Oodle is in terms of unique visitors.

As you can see 2008 is a great year so far for people searching for “houses for rent” on Google.

Why is it so good, is it because the housing market?