How Landlords Can Avoid Gumtree’s Advertising Fees

admin    Landlords, Real Estate     Gumtree, letting links, property rental, rental adverts

No one is sure what happened or why, but earlier this year it was announced that Gumtree, the classified website owned by eBay was going to be charging for their once free service. Gumtree was a place that landlords could post free adverts for vacant rental properties and find tenants quickly and easily. It was a very effective site – and free!

The way Gumtree used to work was that landlords could post as many adverts for free. So if a landlord had several properties, he/she could post as many as necessary without it costing a fortune. They would list their properties from newest to oldest. If a landlord wanted his listing to be visible at the top of search results, he’d have to “bump” his listing frequently in order to be put back at the top.

“Bumping” used to be a simple case of logging in and resubmitting your advert. This would automatically push your ad to the top because it would tell Gumtree that the property was still available. The ‘bump’ feature was absolutely necessary, especially in high volume areas such as London, where there were hundreds of vacant properties added daily. It wouldn’t take long before your advert would sink to the bottom and within a couple of hours be completely out of sight. Without being able to ‘bump’ the advert it would become completely useless.

The old pricing structure was wonderful, which is why Gumtree received so much praise from many landlords through the blogs.

But as is the case with many free listing sites, the word ‘free’ only remains for so long before the powers that be deem it necessary to charge the very people that make the site ‘valuable’ to use their service, you!

The result…Gumtree now charges £9.95 per ad (you get your first 2 ads free) and for unlimited ads they charge a fee of £42 per month. In addition Gumtree also has used this opportunity to revoke the free ‘bump’ feature! This is now chargeable at £2 per day outside of London and £7.14 per day in London, which would amount to £49.98 per week if you decided to do it every day; which you will probably need to do if you want your advert to be read at all!

Now having said all of this, one might start to wonder ‘how does Gumtree monitor and figure out how to limit Landlords to 2 free adverts per year?’ Since landlords didn’t have to register in order to post an advert it didn’t seem technically possible to restrict the free usage so a little research was in order. From the research carried out it would seem that the way Gumtree keeps track of usage is through email addresses.

Anyone with multiple email addresses (and if you don’t they’re certainly easy to obtain) could get many adverts posted for free. It’s also possible to use this system to avoid the costs of ‘bumping’, since all you would need to do is delete the ad, and re-enter under a new email – for FREE.

So now we have shared that golden nugget of information with you, our loyal readers, before you run off and begin posting free property adverts on Gumtree once more, we would like to ask you to consider this…

Aside from its mass traffic generation ability, historically, Gumtree’s unique selling point to landlords was to provide a service by which they could market their properties to a huge audience at no cost. A fantastic, no-brainer service if it’s free, but now it isn’t one should question what they are actually getting for their money.

Ok, we have shown you a way to make the service essentially free for you to use again, but is Gumtree really providing a good service for the average Landlord?

There are several reasons to consider but one that stands out like a sore thumb is Gumtree’s primitive search feature. It is hard to search for properties of interest at the best of times on the site, but with all the extra work involved in keeping the service free, is it really worth it?

There are other options that will be cheaper and easier with less time consumption that would be well worth looking into. User-friendly portal Letting Links is free to use and is growing in popularity everyday. With the sites unique ability to match tenants with properties and vice versa based on their requirements, could there be a simpler, more effective way to rent your property out?

If you rely on finding quality tenants online then Letting Links is just the ticket you’re looking for! Check us out to find out how we can save you money and get you in touch with the right tenants.