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Tips for a Better Sublease Listing
by Drew Fetsch

If you're reading this, chances are that you've already taken a big first step in finding someone to sublease your place by listing it here. We have heard from tons users about how they were amazed with how fast they found someone. Yes, it's true, you can find a subtenant in an hours time. But, the truth of the matter is that to get that kind of result, you need to spend a couple extra minutes to make your listing more effective.

To begin the process, you need to put yourself in the place of someone looking to rent a sublease. Do a sublease search yourself. Use our sublease search to find a sublease that about the same as yours. Select the same general area that your sublease is in and choose the same general time frame for the dates available selection. Using just those options take a look at what comes up at the top of the search results. These are the listings that are getting the most people to look at them. Is yours near the top? If you just added your listing it should be! When people first do a search the listings are returned in order of when they were last updated.

Another common search technique people use is to sort the listings by price. Click the "rent" column title to resort the listings. You may need to click it again to ensure that the listings are ordered from less expensive to more expensive. Is your listing within the first page of search results? If so, you've priced your sublease competitively. A competitive price is important for quickly finding someone to rent your place. Though, if you have the luxury of being able to wait a week or more before absolutely needing to find someone, you can be a little less competitive with pricing and possibly get more rent from someone who is not price sensitive.

Click on some of the listings that come up in your searching. Carefully look at the listings. Take down a couple notes on what catches your eye and what might help draw more interest in your own listing. "Sublease my apartment" isn't as effective as a thorough description that really sells your place. People want information. They're using the Internet to find a sublease so they can do most of their search from their computer. You need to convey what your place is like in writing. But that's not all...

Writing about your place is extremely important, but so are photos. Don't skimp on one or the other. A great benefit of our site is not just that you can list your sublease for free, but that you can add several photos as well! If you have a digital camera take some shots of your place. If you don't have a digital camera, don't worry, it's cheap to take regular film to your local drug store and get a digital version on CD. Get pictures of the bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen and even the building itself. But before you do, make sure your place is clean. Dirty pots and pans on the kitchen counter, a pile of garbage in your bedroom or disgusting toilet are certainly going to produce photos that will scare off anyone from subleasing from you. So once you're place is clean, and you've got the pictures of it, sort through and find the best one for each room. Add these photos to your listing.

If you apply all of this to your listing, there is just one more thing to do. Check the listings every few days to scope out your competition and make updates to your own listings. Not only will this help you keep your listing competitive, but also your listing will come back to the top of the default search results which are sorted by the date they were last updated.

Here are a few other morsels for getting the most out of your sublease listing:

  • Make sure the start and end date for your sublease make sense. Making it available from October 1st through November 15th means hardly anyone will find your listing. Be mindful of the academic calendar. If you are listing your place for the summer, pick a start date as early as you can move out, and an end date as late as you can. If, when people search, they choose a date outside of your availability, they're never going to see your listing.
  • Be aware of price points. If you set your rent at $400, you'really should consider charging $390 or even $399. Look at the price selection when searching for a sublease listing to find what works best for you.
  • Consider enhancing your sublease listing. Sublease enhancements get your listing noticed by highlighting your listing with eye-catching colors and also give you the chance to include a short sales pitch in the search results. That's not all! Special formatting options for your listing become available when you enhance it. You can enhance your listing from the sublease manager.

Following the advice laid out here you should now be much closer to not only finding someone quickly to rent your place, but you might even be able to make a little more money than you were originally going to ask for. Good luck!


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