We had a rentoid customer asking for advice on how to get more rentals. We sent him the information below and thought it was worth sharing here on our blog. Our little bag of tricks!
We get many thousands of rentals every week. There are however some keys to getting your items rented out and they are as follows. I guarantee if you follow these rules you will get rental income:
1. Make sure your pricing is right. We recommend the following pricing structure (that is rental fee on your items).
- Charge 1% of the items value for 1 day rental.
- Charge 2% of items value for a weekend.
- Charge 5% for a weekly rate. and
- Charge 10% of items value for a months rental.
Check your pricing.
2. Write a long and detailed description of your rental items. People want detail so they don’t waste their time. Give your item the full description.
3. Have many photos. You can upload many photos for each item. Make sure you have pictures which show what they are renting so there are ‘no surprises.
4. Share your rental listings. Once you have listed an item on rentoid.com - make sure you share it on your facebook account and twitter (if you have one). You can also like your own items on rentoid… so your friends will see your stuff for rent. You’ll notice every item on rentoid has the ability to “like” it on facebook and also twitter. Just click it - it is very easy. This also adds your Google ranking of your item.
5. Share rentoid - the more people that use / know about rentoid the more they share it - which equals renters for you. So share the goodness. Post it on your facebook page…. tell / email to friends. Favourite the rentoid facebook page - share it:
6. List items people want. Like all businesses it is about 20% of the itms that get 80% of all the rental transactions. So make sure you are renting stuff people need / want. The most popular items are those things that people only use temporarily. eg A Lawn mower, A caravan, a tent, A nintendo Wii, a jetski. Stuff we love to use on a weekend or for an event / party or for a project. These are the things that people need and want, and would rather rent than buy. If you want to know what people want. Then a good trick is to check the catalogs from retail stores. People generally rent the same things that people buy…. items in demand.
7. Trial - A lot of people rent things as a try before you buy. I personally rented out my iPad and had it ‘paid off’ in 5 weeks because so many people wanted to rent it before they bought one…
8. Send us a list of the items you want to list. We’ll give you some advice on their demand (how often they are searched) and some pricing / promo advice.
9. Have a ‘reasonable’ bond & terms on conditions which are ‘fair’. If your bond price is crazy people will say ‘too hard’ and rent the next thing…. Just make it like 20-40% of the items retail value.
Let us know if you would like any further advice - also send me some links to your items and I’ll put them on the blog to promote them for you which will help for sure.
Cheers, the rentoid team.
