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You are here: Home / I am a Reluctant Landlord / A Beginners’ Guide to Postlets.com: Part 1

A Beginners’ Guide to Postlets.com: Part 1

January 11, 2016 by Elizabeth Bennett Colegrove 3 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links.

Authors Note: I put together this resource hoping it would help after seeing many questions on Postlets.com. I am not affiliated with the company nor is this legal advice. All information within this post is my own based on my personal experiences and what I have seen over the years belonging to various forums. As always, my goal is for you to have the most successful landlording experience as possible.

One of my absolutely favorite places to list my houses for rent is Postlets.com. It is not only free, but SO easy to use — for those who are listing their house to rent and those listing a house to sell. However, I am a believer that like everything in the world, real estate is not different in the fact that nothing is easy the first time.

Postlets.com

I know deciding where to list your house can be very overwhelming since there are more than 17 places to list your house. While there are tons of options, Postlets.com is my absolute favorite go-to. Remember there are certainly best practices when putting together your ad, and using Postlets is easy and painless.

I created this how-to guide for using Postlets.com. Hopefully these tips and tricks from my success and LOTS of failures help you bypass many of the mistakes I made and help you have a successful listing.

Guide to Using Postlets.com

1. Create an account at postlets.com.

The best part is it is FREE! They do not ask for any credit or other information. Go to postlets.com and you will see this page.

Postlets Sign Up Page

Once you get to the home screen, go to the Sign Up Here icon in the top right hand corner (where the error is located).

2. Sign up for a free account.

I love that Postlets require just an email address and password. Very easy and simple!

Sign Up Box For Postlets

Tip – Use your main email address or one you check often/regularly. While I have never had spam issues with Postlets, this is how they send me all of my inquiries. As I have mentioned, okay wrote about in a entire post (yes it is that important) the quicker you can respond to an inquiry the better.

3. Go to the main screen.

This is the main screen that will be your guide. As a newbie with no houses, your screen will appear blank.  As a beginner, with no other listings all you will need to know is the New Postlet Box (where the red arrow is located). This is where you will get started.


Postlets Start Page

The great thing about Postlets.com is they will save all of your houses/listings that you have ever inputted in the system. It doesn’t matter if it was a draft, old listing, or even active. They keep it from the very beginning. Here is what my screen looks likes like.

 

Postlets Home Screen with Inputted Houses

As you can see, Postlets divides your screens into three categories.

  • Active Posts – These are the houses that are being listed.
  • Drafts – These are posts that you worked on but never posted (i.e. published).
  • Expired Posts – These are old posts that you listed at one time.

Tip – Postlets.com and its publishing partners (Zillow, Trulia, etc) cannot support both for-sale and for-rent at the same time. If you have your house listed as for-sale, you or your agent (whose system usually automatically publishes to these sites) won’t be able to list push your house. The same goes if your agent’s multiple listing service system automatically publishes and you already had a for-rent listing. The first listing to publish is the one that stays unless it is removed or claimed.

If you are not a first-time user of Postlets.com or want to go more in-depth to what this picture is showing, check out this post — Step-by-Step Guide to Postlets as a Non-Beginner. In this post, I get into a more in-depth guide for using Postlets.com once you have published, or in Postlets’ language, “posted,” your first ad.

4. This is the main ad screen.

Before we get started on how to fill out the first page, let’s discuss the new format and outline. Since you will work with this new format the entire time you are working on the ad, let’s go over it so there is no confusion. There are four parts to the ad.

Main Postlets Ad Screen

Left Side (Blue Arrow) – The left side illustrates the seven sections the program is broken up into. You are able to click on the section to move between the different parts of the ad. This column in found on all seven sections and illustrates what page you are on.

Activate Button – This button will finalize your ad and post it to the world. Never hit this button before you have saved. Otherwise you lose ALL your updates (yes I have lost them!).

Save Button – ALWAYS ALWAYS save repeatedly through out the process. While there is some auto saving occurring, I have also lost everything. Therefore, I recommend saving repeatedly throughout the process and ALWAYS before you activate your post.

Right Side (Red Arrow) – The right side will change depending on the section. This is the part that walks you through all the questions that the program needs to properly auto populate the ad. This is the section that will change and what we will focus on for the rest of this tutorial.

Now that we have explained the main screen, let’s talk about the first section.

5. Location – Tell Us About Your Property

This is the very first section where you will input the beginning information about your property.

Location - Tell Us About Your Property

There are two parts to this section.

  1. Address – This is where you fill out the entire address of the house. If you do not want the house address to be shown, you can click the box “hide street number.” You will still be able to see the house on the map but potential applicants will not know the street number.
  2. Postlet Category – You can only pick one category. The system will not show a house as both for rent and for sale in the same manner that Military By Owner will. Therefore, you must choose your first choice.

Tips- 

  1. I personally like showing the street number as I find that is one of the top questions I get from people when applying.
  2. The great thing between toggling the hide and not hide street number is it helps reset the clock. Otherwise the listing can appear to be stale with a long date on the market number. This can happen if you have dropped the house price a lot or you had a lot of leeway between when your tenants were moving out and when you posted the ad.

Once you have finished with this part, hit save and continue on to the section. ALWAYS hit the save button and not the activate button.

Side Note

If your address is not automatically filling, you can create your own address.

How to Create Your Own Address in Postlets

Click on the create your own address as indicated by the red arrow. This will expand your choices giving you the screen below.

Expanded Tell us About Your Property

 

This expanded option allows you to input your city, state, and zip code.

Tips: Always double check your address before using this feature. While there are some communities that are not found due to newness (i.e. new construction), more often than not it is operator error, not computer error. I figured this out after one of my houses was five miles down the road in the middle of a field! So double check that you have the address correct, otherwise the program will not properly list it on the map causing it not to be found when potential applicants are searching for homes.

6. Basic Details Section

As you can see once you input your location the program automatically inputs your houses address and bedrooms/bathrooms at the top header.

Postlet Ad Header

The first page took care of both location and contact information.

The next page covers two sections — lease terms and rental details. You can learn more about these sections in The Beginner’s Guide Part 2.

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Filed Under: I am a Reluctant Landlord, I am a Small Time Landlord, I am an Empire Builder, Self Management

Comments

  1. Jim Smith says

    May 4, 2016 at 6:09 pm

    Love the site, this article probably needs to be updated as postlets has been reimagined by zillow.

    Reply
    • Elizabeth Bennett Colegrove says

      May 19, 2016 at 11:09 pm

      Totally agree, I plan on putting together another one. Unfortunately that took quiet a while to make.

      Reply
  2. John says

    September 15, 2016 at 12:29 pm

    Besides hiding street number is there a way to actually hide the address itself? Does it also publish phone number

    Also I tried creating an account and it does ask for street address and phone number now

    Reply

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