A great headline draws visitors’ attention right away. Remember those magazines on the checkout counter of grocery store? For an online ad, it is even more important with all the distractions that one can get while surfing the web.

Providing a clean and user friendly ad page is always the highest priority of our site and we put the headline at the most visible location and stay away from things like popups. However, we sometimes see ad with title like “Condo for rent”, which doesn’t really say anything and probably will be ignored by the visitors. Your can make your ad’s headline better by simply adding some specific information to start with. For example, comparing with “Condo for rent”, “Two bedroom condo at a convenient location for rent” looks much better; or to make it even more appealing, how about “Two bedroom condo in [insert city name]’s most sought after neighborhood”?

Be specific

What is the best feature that you love about your property? Nice jacuzzi tub, cabinet space, or the big swimming pool you enjoy during the summer? For an existing homeowner these may be taken for granted, but for a potential renter/buyer, these “little things” can be exactly what they are looking for.

We provide ways to include these important features in ad publisher so make sure include your “fenced in yard” or “swimming pool” in your ad. When someone search these specific terms on FindMyRoof.com or online, what do you think the odds of your ad showing up if you don’t have these keywords included?

One of the biggest advantage of advertising online is that you are not charged by the number of words that your ad has (in our case, it’s free) and you have better and more ways to present your property. So in order to make your ad stands out, list the things you like the most and present them as best as you can, which leads to my next point:

A picture is worth a thousand words

I know, the phrase itself has been used zillions of times. But it still holds especially true for real estate ads. Photos truly benefit the ad viewers and that’s why we allow unlimited number of photos at FindMyRoof.com. With the quality of today’s digital cameras, there’s really no excuse to skip the photos. You can upload them easily form your computer or an online source using our ad publisher, so take as many shots of your favorite features about the property as possible and let them be seen.

“Online” can not replace “offline”

This may sound ironic since FindMyRoof.com itself is an online platform. But the fact that most of the real estate is still marketed to the local people makes offline effort equally important, if not more.

There are several ways that you can try to advertise offline:

• Place a for rent/sale sign in front of your property with a brochure box.
• Spread flyers about the availability locally in public places where bulletin boards are installed. Best places are schools, work place, or churches. FindMyRoof.com offers flyer generation tool which you can use to create pdf flyers for your ad with a couple of click.
• Consider the local papers. It’s probably a waste of time and money to try to put classified ads on big newspapers these days. But sometimes great spot can be bought cheaply on some local publications with small circulations. If targeted correctly, an ad can gain some good visibility.

Lastly, understand the risk and protect your identity

When your ad is on the Internet, it can be viewed by anyone with a computer and Internet connection. Although WE BLOCK the access from visitors outside of United States, there are still spammers who manage to scrape our content and re-post them on other websites. It is a hassle for property owners, to say the least.

Besides using more diligence when describing your property without revealing your personal information, you can also consider using our privacy protection feature like “hide your address” so the identity of your property can be better protected as well. And as always, do not trust anyone who don’t want to meet, or have an excuse to avoid meeting in person.

EDIT:

After watching this video I think “being honest” should be added to the list above. Even it is “painfully honest”.

So what have been added?

The Google street map

This is not exactly new but we made it better. You can now view the Google street map and navigate around the block in camera view if it’s available.

Yelp.com business reviews

Yelp (yelp.com) is a website that connects people with great local businesses. It provides a nice API to show the businesses in a specific area. With the API, we are able to “mash up” the business reviews on Yelp into our listings. You can find their locations, ratings and reviews right on a map. So If you want to see what kind of food, shopping or local services you can get, open up the neighborhood view and the information is there for you.

Movie theaters

Everyone wants to enjoy a movie once in a while. And we put Americans’ number one entertainment choice in the neighborhood view as well. If you are a movie fan, it’s probably not a good idea to live in a place where there is no theaters around so make sure to check it out!

Schools and libraries

This is a great addition for those who are looking for family friendly places. Of course we all do but if you have kids, it’s better to know what are school options, how far are they, and whether there are libraries close by so you can easily borrow books for the little ones. With this information, I hope moms and dads have a easier time to make their decision.

This is an exciting upgrade and it’s also just a start. Since there is so much information about a neighborhood and different visitors may have different areas of interest, we are looking forward to adding more interesting and useful subjects. As always, let us know your thoughts and feedback!

For the ad posters, we want to make sure you understand that we don’t re-post or distribute your ad to a third party. Your ad on FindMyRoof ends here on FindMyroof. If you found out that your property has been posted on other sites without your authorization, please contact the support or management on the involved sites immediately. 

Most scammers operate outside of United States, they often claim they are abroad for various reasons, their request of cash to be sent abroad upfront is surely a telltale sign of scamming. For this reason we don’t allow foreign contact on our ad. If you encounter any ad on FindMyRoof whose contact person is located outside United States, please notify us immediately or “report it” from the ad page.

We do apologize for the inconvenience for those want to post real estate ads on FindMyRoof but are currently abroad. One way to use our service is to find a friend or family member who resides in US and can help you post ad and forward inquiries. And thank you for understanding.

If you still experience problem like being randomly kicked out of a login session, please make sure email us.

Although only a very small percentage of our users who are using IE browsers (not all the IE users are affected) had these problems, we felt the issue was serious enough and basically rebuilt the authentication mechanism for the site.

Oh by the way, Firefox is a much better web browser and we love using it.

Basically you have a US map that is lightened up by the locations with valid zip codes. When you type a zip code, the map will highlight the location for it. The best part is, the map takes a progressive approach, like Google Earth. For example, it will react beased on the very first digit you type, and continuously narrow down to the location as you finish the whole 5 digits.

Very nice tool if you try to figure out where a zip code is located.

Happy 2009!

You might have noticed that the site has been updated. The main objective of this release is to deliver a better browsing and searching experience.

Now you can search your location from the location bar by putting in a state, a city name or zip code.

As we all know, real estate property is about location, location and location. We want you be able to find your location easily and quickly.

How about the searching the property features? You can now do it from the left hand side of the listings. With more open spaces we added more search criteria so you can quickly get what you are looking for.

So that’s about it. As always comments or suggestions? Feel free to drop us a line!

You can select a date or a date range and specify the availability. We believe this will bring more complete information to our site visitors and hopefully a step toward bringing more leads to your listings.

Enjoy!

Below are some of the highlights:

New ad publisher makes it even easier to create and manage your ads.

The new ad publishing page uses the flexible tab design so different aspects of the ad can be accessed easily. If for some reason a new post was not finished, a draft would be automatically saved and kept for up to 48 hours so you can always come back later and pick up from where you left.

More features added to each ad type

One big strength of FindMyRoof.com is the capability of presenting the customized information based on different ad types. In this release, we’ve enhanced this feature and added more property amenities. “Vacation rental” category sees the most changes in this area with a lot of additional features added, and hopefully this will be a great help for the property managers.

Enhanced interface

We have made some small look and feel tweaks to improve the site’s usability.

Google map street view is in

Google map street view has been covering more and more cities. It is such a nice tool and we don’t want our users to miss out on this one. A “view street map” link will be added to each ad and if the street map is available a cool camera view will be displayed side by side with the regular map to show a “virtual tour” of the street view.

More control over spam

It has become quite an issue now that scammers have been snatching legit ads online and turning them into scam bait. Maintaining the ad quality and controlling the spam have been the most important goals that we are constantly improving on.

There are a lot of other changes in this release and I’m not going to list all of them here. As always, suggestions and comments are welcome!

Cheers!

If you think about it, creative marketing strategy like these does make a lot of business sense. Today one can return almost anything back to a store if the goods is not satisfying or he(she) just simply changed his(her) mind. Why not having a trial period on a house too?

By spending a couple of days and nights in a potential future home, buyers should be able to find out more about:

• The property.
• The neighborhood and its surrounding areas.
• The actual noise level throughout the day and night.
• The commute to work since most people don’t really “test drive” on this.

I believe some serious potential buyers wouldn’t mind paying extra for a couple of days and nights staying in a house just to get familiar with the properties they are interested in and to see if they are indeed what they want.

Of course, there will be details or arrangement needed to be worked out for this kind of “date” to cover any risks and liabilities to the property. Similar contracts used by hotels may be used for this purpose. And a real estate agent will be an excellent facilitator for this to screen out potential buyers.

The report might try to paint a dim picture, but looking from the other side of the coin there are 72% of people who are able to afford a home, which doesn’t sound too bad. Homeownership is expensive no matter how cheap a house is. Adding all the mortgage payment, insurance, property tax and maintenance, it could be a major expense for one household.

Not sure if there is any stats available for United States. I’ll see if I can find it and publish it here.