Why doesn't my property appear where I want it to on the portals?
We are often asked:
- Can my property title be changed to include a different place name?
- Why doesn't my property appear for the search term X.
Here's why
On OpenRent, Rightmove, Zoopla and pretty much every portal...
On most portals, a search works by the user entering a location. This is then translated into a search area, if your property is within this area, then your property will appear. Hence, the most important aspect of making sure your advert appears for appropriate searches, is to check the location on the map is correct.
If the location on the map is correct, then tenants will be able to find it, regardless of the title.
Please Note that it may take up to 1 hour to appear in some OpenRent searches after listing (due to caching), and 3-6 hours before appearing on Rightmove, Zoopla and other portals.
Gumtree:
Gumtree is the main source of confusion for our landlords, fundamentally because its search is not designed for property, but for all types of classified ads.
When we send Gumtree your property address, they categorise that into one of the areas you see on the list to the left of the search. This is a set of regions such as "London Bridge", "London", "Derby", etc. The more densely populated, the finer grained the region.
What can happen is that we send them the correct address, but the closest "region" is named differently. Hence, when a user searches (using the search boxes), your property will not appear. We do our best to combat this by including the important details of your address in the title. How many bedrooms (spelt two ways to overcome their broken search), street name, town name, and first part of the post code. Any of these entered into the first search box "Find A..", will work. For the "In" search box, it must include the region your ad has been classified in, or the first part of the post code.
We send Gumtree (like with any other portal) your full address. Whilst I've tried to explain their system, the problems people have is essentially a failure of the Gumtree search, which of all the systems is by far the most confusing (and non-user friendly).
Without wanting to be too disparaging about the Gumtree search - the point is that we have thought long and hard about making sure we find you the most number of tenants, you're in good in hands, and OpenRent processes thousands of leads from Gumtree weekly.
Please Note that it may take up to 36 hours to appear on Gumtree searches after listing - Gumtree only allow us to send properties and updates once a day and this is out of our control.