If you’re looking for new tenants, it’s important to use an advertising medium that delivers the highest number of quality candidates, quickly and at the lowest cost.

There are a number of viable media to compare, including portals like Rightmove or Zoopla, property marketplace sites such as HouseShop or SpareRoom, social media sites like Facebook or classified sites like Gumtree that have a property section.

Depending on your target market and budget, Rightmove and Gumtree are both effective in their own way for finding tenants. If you are offering a high-value property, for example, one of them may offer you better access to high-quality tenants. And, the opposite may be true if you are offering ‘budget’ rental.

So, it’s useful to start by looking at the way Rightmove and Gumtree work.

Gumtree

Gumtree is an online classified advertising site. Of its 13.8 million monthly visitors, it claims around 1.5 million visits to Gumtree Property per month and currently lists more than 34,000 properties for rent from both private landlords and agents. Of those current listings, more than 31,000 featured pictures and almost 12,000 were placed by private landlords.

Visitors can search for rental properties by a number of factors, including location, flat or house, number of rooms and rental price. Location could be an important factor. If you are offering an ‘average’ property, you may decide to advertise it locally. But, if it has special features or an attractive location, you may prefer not to use the location filters and reach a wider audience.

The individual property pages provide brief details, photos and a contact link. Basic listings on this site are free for private landlords, although you can pay for optional upgrades to make your advertisement stand out in the crowd.

The options are chargeable and include ‘Features’, which allows your ad to rotate in the highlighted section at the top of the page for periods of 3, 7 or 14 days. You can add an 'Urgent' tag to highlight the immediacy of your ad or place your ad in a ‘Homepage Spotlight’ where it will appear for 7 days.

To place an ad, you register on the site and within minutes you can upload your advert with an unlimited description and up to 9 photos. Your advert will stay live on the site for 60 days and if you wish to update any details you can do so anytime free of charge.

Although Gumtree can provide large numbers of leads, commentators warn that many of the enquiries may be low quality and some may be scammers, so it pays to be cautious.

Rightmove

In terms of scale and reach, Rightmove is much larger than Gumtree attracting more than 135 million visits every month with many looking to rent. In fact, in May 2020 Rightmove recorded the highest level of rental enquiries ever recorded in a single day with six million visits. Although those figures represent enquiries across the whole country, the Rightmove site allows visitors to filter their search by area, size of property and many other factors. However, attracting just a small number of enquiries from that massive figure means you could find new tenants quickly and start earning more income. You can find out how much rent you could stand to make through our online rent calculator.

Like Gumtree, ads on Rightmove include descriptions and photographs, although the limit on Rightmove’s standard ad is 2 thumbnail photographs compared to the maximum of 9 on Gumtree.

One major barrier, however, is that Rightmove does not allow private landlords to advertise directly. The only way to advertise on Rightmove is by using the services of a High Street estate agency or an online lettings agency that subscribes to the Rightmove service. Treehaus can help here. For a fee of just £1, you can advertise your rental property on Rightmove for seven days. If you need longer to find a tenant, the cost is just £14 for blocks of 14 days.

The process is simple too. All you have to do is upload the property details and photographs to our easy-to-use online dashboard and we place the advertisements on the portals. We forward enquiries to you via our portal so that you can arrange your own checks and viewings.

Treehaus can help

Both Gumtree and Rightmove can help you find tenants quickly. If you would like to discuss which option is most suitable for your property, or if you would like to take advantage of our Rightmove advertising service, click the pink button.