Renter Leads, Zillow, and the Database You're Probably Not Building

For years, my honest take on renter leads was that they had negative value.

If a prospect called with a pile of questions and needed hand-holding to book a showing, my instinct was: I don't even want to deal with you. I wanted someone who could read a listing, respond like a normal person, and fill out an application. That was the whole bar.

Then Alex Stringfellow came on my podcast and poked a hole in that thinking. Alex is CEO and co-founder of RentEngine (the leasing software we use at RL) and he put a number on the thing I'd been writing off. A renter lead, he argues, is worth somewhere between $24 and $90. And once you factor in what Zillow is doing to our access to renters, that number stops being trivia and starts looking like strategy.

The Renter Lead You're Calling "Free" Isn't Free

In the scattered-site world, we treat renters as free. Not even negative, just free. They show up, they inquire, we lease the unit, we move on.

Alex went and pressure-tested that. He talked to multifamily operators, including a senior marketing person at Greystar (the largest PM company in the country), and landed on that $24–90 range depending on how you count it. Multifamily has been treating renter leads as an acquisition cost with real dollars attached for years. We haven't.

The reason this matters now: platform risk. The websites we syndicate to control the flow of leads to us, and that control is tightening. When someone else owns the pipe between you and your customer, the leads you already have (the ones who gave you permission to contact them) quietly become one of the few things you actually own.

I've spent zero time investing here. On the owner side, we're religious about our CRM, our follow-up cadences, our lead nurture. On the renter side, we've got nothing that rigorous. That gap is the point.

Text Is the Heart of Leasing, Not the Scheduling

The part of the conversation I keep thinking about is Alex's read on how renters actually behave.

He described watching a guy in a coffee shop scroll Zillow. The guy sets his filters (price, beds, baths, neighborhood), flips to map view, and clicks through the listings that fit. If the photos land, he hits the contact button. Ten listings, maybe seven or eight minutes, and then there's nothing left to do. He closes the laptop and comes back in a week.

That seven-to-eight-minute window is the whole game. Alex's core insight (the reason he was willing to walk into a crowded market against Rently, Tenant Turner, and ShowMojo) is that the incumbents built around showing scheduling, the if-this-then-that calendar-link flow. What actually converts is communication, and specifically text.

Three things make or break it: how fast the prospect hears back, what the text actually says, and the follow-up cadence. Nobody's checking email. And the prospect usually has a real question before they'll book anything: do you take Section 8, will you accept my two German shepherds, can I move in next week. Miss the reply in that window and they've moved on. About 75% of prospects, per Alex, never pick up the phone at all.

Problem, solution, why: prospects go cold in minutes (problem), so you answer instantly by text and follow up on their schedule (solution), because that's the only channel with a 90%+ read rate and the only one fast enough to catch them while the laptop's still open (why). One detail I liked: if a lead inquires around 6pm and books around 6pm, that tells you 6pm is when they do their leasing. So that's when you follow up.

You're Paying Twice for the Same Lead

This one genuinely made my jaw drop.

I asked Alex about Zumper, which used to look like a monster in lead flow and seems to have faded. His answer opened up something I hadn't fully clocked: the dirty secret of the rental listing sites is that a huge share of their traffic is just Google. Renters think about renting once every two or three years. They have no loyalty to Zillow or Apartments.com. So when someone Googles "houses for rent in Columbus," whoever bought the top sponsored link gets that lead, and it's usually Zillow or Apartments.com.

Which means we're paying twice. We pay Zillow's platform fee, and Zillow pays Google to capture the lead in the first place. I'm handing money to Zillow for a Google lead I could theoretically buy myself.

Alex's take: for operators past roughly 1,000 units with real density in a few neighborhoods, buying those Google leads directly can pencil out. Not on "Columbus homes for rent." You'll never make that ROI work against the platforms' budgets. But on long-tail keywords the listing sites don't bother bidding on ("east Upper Arlington homes for rent"), the per-click cost drops and the math can flip. You'd want someone who knows Google Ads cold. The upside: those leads have only seen your company. They aren't getting sprayed across six other properties.

I told Alex this sounds like a whole business waiting to happen: the geeky real-estate-marketing-guy model, but for renter leads instead of owner leads. He didn't disagree.

The Database Is the Asset, and It Might Show Up at Sale

Where this all points: a clean, organized bank of renter leads is a compounding asset, and Alex thinks it eventually gets a value assigned to it when a PM company sells, the way Google reviews now carry weight in a deal.

The logic holds up. Renters are renting longer and later in life, and most Americans don't move far. If someone inquired on one of your properties this February, there's a decent chance they'll be back in market near one of your homes next year, and the year after. Reach out in late December or early January and you catch them right as they start thinking about moving again. That's a lead you re-engage for free, through your own list, with no platform in the middle.

On sequencing, Alex borrows from e-commerce, which he figures is about ten years ahead of leasing. Warm the list with email a month or two out (nice photos, brand awareness, "here's what RL has for rent in this part of Columbus this month"), then hit them with a short, direct text when they're actually in market. Text gets read; email keeps you top of mind. He's got a remarketing feature aimed squarely at this shipping in early fall.

Where I Pushed Back, and Where I Landed

I'll be straight about the tension: RentEngine is an affiliate and a product we pay for, and Alex has every reason to make renter leads sound valuable. I went in skeptical, both about the leads and about anything that deepens our dependence on Zillow, which I've been vocal about disliking.

But the pricing is genuinely aligned in a way I respect: $45 per listing, one time, whether it sits two weeks or two months, versus per-unit-per-month on listings that aren't even available. The incentive is to get the thing leased and off the market, which is my incentive too. And the product velocity is real: they ship features weekly, bootstrapped, no VC or PE money, with a team that mostly comes out of property management. Most of the software I use has slowed down exactly when it should be speeding up.

The takeaway I'm sitting with: I was wrong to write renter leads off as garbage. They're not going to run themselves (you have to catch them in that seven-minute window and actually keep the list), but in a world where the platforms are tightening their grip on our customers, the renter database might be one of the few pieces of leverage we still own outright. That's worth paying attention to.