We're starting to get a bit of a problem with what we're calling "drive-by advertisers".

The root of the problem is that people have a low perceived value placing an ad on Rentability, because it's free to advertise your property with us. There are lots of other free ad sites out there that, because they are free, can't afford to do any promotion and get very little traffic. Holiday home owners will place ads on these sites, but using an R-selection strategy - basically making lots of adverts on a lot of sites, but putting very little effort into their ad because they don't expect much return. This is actually a false perception of Rentability - although it's free to advertise with us we aren't a "free" site (although we give away so many credits to people who sign up now that we don't expect the early adopters to pay anything for a couple of years). We charge for enquiries, so we can afford to actively promote the site and we've worked very hard to make a site which makes your advert look as good as it can.

The upshot for us is that we're getting quite a few ads which just have a single photo and some copied-and-pasted text (sometimes, bizarrely, ALL IN CAPS or with messy line breaks and lots of spelling mistakes). These scruffy ads will bring down the quality of the site if we don't do something about them, and potential holiday home renters will get a bad first impression of our site and leave before seeing the better adverts.

It's a difficult problem for us because we don' want to be turning advertisers away, but we have to find a way to get them to invest a bit more in their advertisement. The solution we've come up with, which we'll probably be implementing in the next few weeks, is to have a "adScore". Each advert on the site will be scored according to a whole bundle of criteria - for instance are there spelling mistakes ? Have they made a Property Tour ? Is the text all in caps ? Is there more than one photo ? etc. etc. The total score for the advert will then be used to bias that advertisements' position in the search result listings.

So - we won't stop people putting crappy adverts on the site, but if they don't put any effort into making their ad then it's unlikely to appear high in the search results - it'll always be last on the list. This gives people an incentive to improve their ad, and it means that visitors coming to Rentability will see the most attractive adverts first - which hopefully means they will be more likely to stick around and actually book one of our advertisers properties.

We've decided to try out another new service. We're going to offer to "clone" an advertisers existing advert from another website for free as an easy way to get their Rentability ad started. Hopefully this will mean that it's absolutely painless to run an ad with us - it costs nothing and on top of that we'll do almost all the work for you !

Of course it's not possible to completely set up an ad in this way - a lot of our features like property tours aren't available on other websites, so you'll have to do those yourself, but we can set up the basics like photos, property descriptions and possibly even availability and pricing. To do the job we've developed a set of clever tools which allow us to automatically read data off most other websites and inject it into Rentability. At the moment the process isn't completely foolproof, and sometimes needs some manual assistance (for instance it can erroneously add a "swimming pool" feature to your property if you have something like "with a municipal swimming pool nearby" in your property description). It's likely to mean a lot of grunt work for us, but I think it's a very cunning idea.

It's starting to feel as if we're really picking up speed and pulling ahead of the other sites in terms of the kinds of features we offer to our advertisers - none of the other sites even seem to bother to think about how they could improve things.

A couple of days ago I added some code to Rentability to count advert visits, per day, per month and an all-time total count. Today I added the first UI so property owners can view this data and actually see how their listings are performing. Here's a screenshot of what account holders now see on their dashboards:

For the moment it's just visits per day for the previous week and a grand total. We'll be improving Rentability's statistics features over the next few months.

We think this is really really great because for the first time (we can't think of a site that already does this) property owners will be able to monitor how well their advert is performing and how updates to their adverts affect its performance (in terms of number of visits and the rate of conversion from viewing to actual enquiry).

I went around to see my sister today, to see if she wanted to go and buy some teabags with me, and when I arrived she was a bit upset. As we worked on the site over the last months we've all had a creeping feeling that encouraging people to take more aeroplanes doesn't feel very comfortable. Now we've launched, the fact that we're becoming part of the global tourism industry and all of the problems it can create - well, it's starting to feel more urgent. We've always holped that once we've got the basics of Rentability sorted out we could try to work on how to do some good with it - but it's really hard to know what to do. Carbon offset calculators ? Articles about cultural responsibility ? Maybe features that allow people to search for a holiday within a given carbon budget ? Maybe we could try to highlight properties that are making a particular effort in that direction. It would take an awful lot of effort, but I'd love to finally make a decent train booking system so it's as easy to book a train from here to france as it is to book a flight. I'm not sure what we should do, and I'm wary of writing a bunch of stuff and sticking a carbon calculator on the site because it just seems tokenistic.

Well... Rentability.com has finally (after months and months and months) come out of the shadows of port 3746 where it's been secretly hiding. It feels very odd to suddenly be exposed like this to the entire big scary internet, especially since (obviously) no-one knows anything about us yet. It feels as if we've suddenly stepped out of the door into Trafalgar Square completely naked (TADA!) while everyone just carried on without taking the slightest bit of notice. We've had a grand total of 3 visitors in the last 24 hours. One of them bears all the signs of being Tom, and I strongly suspect that at least one of them is me. I'm pretty damn excited about mystery guest number three though.

We finally made it! As of 14th of May, Rentability.com goes live and we start our (hopefully short) public 'beta' period. It's been a heck of a lot of hard work, even to get this far, but we think it's been worth it. We feel Rentability is indeed something special.

So what's this blog for? Well, it should be a good place to keep interested parties up-to-date with the latest Rentability goings-on. Information on site updates - new features etc - will be posted here along with anything else we feel a burning desire to share with the world.

We started this project because we thought that existing holiday rental websites weren't really offering what they should to either property owners or would-be holiday makers. We thought that these sites should have more powerful search facilities - why shouldn't you be able to find all properties with plasma TVs if you know that information is in the owner's adverts? We thought that property owners should be able to create more detailed and attractive listings. That's why, amongst other things, we don't put limits on the number of photos used to describe a property. Upload as many photos as you like! (Okay, maybe I should set some kind of limit now. Hmm, alright, you can't upload more than 1000 photos of your property!)