5 Free Rental Listing Sites Every Landlord Needs to Know About

The question on everyone’s lips, the thought in everyone’s mind… Can Landlords really find quality tenants online on free rental listing websites?

Well, actually there are a couple of questions people have. Sorry for the misleading intro.

Other questions include but are not limited to:

• Do landlords need to go through a letting agent?
• Are the tenants acquired from free sites any good?
• What other options can landlords consider?

The short answers:

• No.
• Yes.
• We’ll get to that later.

In this article, we outline some of the best free websites for creating a rental listing and promoting listing your properties on, as well as help you think outside the box. We aim to help give you a broad oversight of acquiring tenants for free.

Note: You can use Landlord Studio’s rental listing feature to create an online listing and easily share it across channels like Facebook Marketplace. Streamline the listing process and collect and manage leads and applications in one place.

5 Top Free Rental Listing Websites

Open Rent – Free trial

Open Rent is currently the UK’s largest online letting agent and for good reason. They have made online listing accessible to – well, everyone. And they’ve made it affordable. You can create a free listing and once you're happy push it to websites like RightMove and Zoopla using their paid plans.

Several people we’ve talked to have found a tenants using Open Rent's paid plan ins as little as 5 days. The paid plans start at £49 for 4 months.

Gumtree

Gumtree has evolved over the years and continues to provide a good opportunity for landlords to share their rental listings for free to an engaged audience.

That being said, using Gumtree comes with a cautionary word. The website gets millions of unique hits every month and the renting section is pretty popular on it.

Our cautionary word though is that there are a few time-wasters on there and Gumtree is well known for generating leads from scammers. Whilst it is always vital that you use a thorough tenant referencing process before making any final decisions to avoid time-wasters and scammers - for Gumtree this is doubly true.

Facebook Marketplace

Everyone has a Facebook account. It’s almost impossible not to. And Facebook continues to develop and push their Marketplace. They allow you to list properties directly on the site and it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Facebook is free, it's easy, and it allows you to quickly verify prospects through a quick profile review and in-app message exchange. Like Gumtree though, the low barrier to entry does also mean more time-wasters. So, again it's worth making sure you have a process in place to separate the serious prospects form the time-wasters.

Craigslist

Like Gumtree you need to be careful with the quality that you get off Craigslist. However, it’s a huge site with millions of monthly hits, so it’s well worth dabbling if you need to fill your property quickly.

SpareRoom

SpareRoom is another big listings website. However, there’s a bit of a misconception (possibly because of their name) that they only allow people to list their spare rooms. For that reason, it appears that a lot of the users on the site are in fact looking for a room to rent. They’ve cornered themselves into this niche with their brand, but they do actually allow people to list more than just rooms on their website.

All that being said they get some 7 million monthly hits so even if only 20% are interested in whole properties for rent that’s still around 1.4 million potential property views.

A Word on Paid Listing Websites

In the true “get what you pay for” style there are several paid options like Upad.co.uk which offer great services that just cost a little more.

When it comes to websites like Rightmove (the biggest listings site on the market), you my need to go through a paid 3rd party service or letting agent. When you do this, they'll normally push your property to all the main rental listing websites such as Rightmove; OnTheMarket; Zoopla; & Prime Location.

With any of these, it’s well worth doing your research and very carefully considering if the fees are worth the services you get.

Going through an agent reduces the hassle and stress of finding tenants and by listing on these big platforms, you'll likely get good and fast results. However, the fees can quickly eat into your bottom line. And personally, we prefer to maintain control over the tenant selection process.

Creating Your Personal Rental Listing Website

If you have a larger portfolio of properties setting up your own website offers its own unique benefits. It becomes the central hub for your online property portfolio. You can feature photos, detailed information, and easily connect with your property management team.

You will want your site to be attractive, easy to navigate, and informative. (Plus, make sure it’s mobile-friendly!)

You can build a website pretty quickly these days, how much it costs will depend on the service you use.

• Professional build – The most expensive option by far, however, if you have a large property portfolio this could be the best solution.
• Free website builder –  i.e. WordPress
• Paid website builder – Web builders like Squarespace, Hostinger, WordPress, and Wix provide affordable build it yourself options. Hostinger even has a real estate website builder with pre-made templates designed for property listings.
• Property management software – Using Landlord Studio you can create a free custom website for your buy-to-let listing which can be promoted and shared however you want.

Additional Listing Costs to Consider:

a. Imagery

You will need to get photography of your property for any of your listings. For your website though you may need additional imagery. You can get a great selection of free stock imagery on websites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay, but you may find you want something specifically created that you may need to pay for.

b. Branding

Again, you can probably get away without branding your website unless you have a large portfolio. A good brand is a very valuable commodity and will give your website a focused visual identity. If you do decide you want to hinge your property portfolio on brand identity, it’s worth getting a professional to do this

c. Domain

Check that your domain is free and purchase it ahead of time somewhere like GoDaddy. These are inexpensive and can be set to renew annually.

d. Hosting

You will likely need to pay a website hosting fee. This is essentially a fee for the space that your website data takes up on a server. For many website builder sites, like Squarespace, this is incorporated into the monthly costs.

Alternative and Traditional Rental Listing Strategies

Our final thoughts on this topic are about the more traditional methods for reaching potential renters. These are generally either free or low cost – you will have to do a bit of research though.

These methods will likely reach a different audience going and receive a different character of the enquirer. That being said a lot of people find these methods to be effective.

Your Local Corner Shop

Alright so this sounds like something from the 1920s – and it is. But we’ve all seen those cork boards up in the corner of the local shop, and we’ve taken a moment to satiate our curiosity with a quick peruse of the collection of notices on it. For that very reason, these are often still quite effective places to post adverts for your property.

Universities

If you can bear the thought of letting a bunch of rowdy 19-22-year-olds into your rental property then you have a stronger stomach than us.

That being said, as often as not, students are pretty good tenants, there are a lot of them – and they need places to sleep. Getting an advert onto the University campus is a pretty sure-fire way to get a load of student inquiry.

One note we would make though is to time when you make the effort with the University terms. Ie. don’t put up your advert after they’ve all gone home for the summer!

Local Newspapers

Yup. Hot off the press this revolutionary news… wait… sorry, the wrong blog.

All jokes aside, this listing idea is thoroughly underrated. Check out how much it might be to get your property listing in the local newspaper, it might just catch the eye of the perfect tenant!

A Final Word: Free Rental Listing Sites

None of these methods or websites will guarantee you find a great tenant – as always it’ll take a little bit of work by you and this leads us to our sign-off and conclusion.

ALWAYS make sure you put your tenants through a rigorous referencing process to help avoid any problematic tenancies. The worst-case scenario is that you could end up needing to pursue an expensive and time consuming eviction.

You can create your free buy-to-let listing today with Landlord Studio to streamline finding and managing tenant leads.