Either today or tomorrow we'll be making an update that adds SMS enquiry notification to our ever-expanding feature set. When an enquiry comes through, property owners can receive an instant text message notification that includes the basic enquiry details. For the time being, this feature will be available free of charge!

Notification messages will look something like this:

Enquiry received: "Tom Riley" <tom@example.com> for Le Pigeonnier Tel: 447890123456. Dates: Wed 12 Dec 07 to Thu 20 Dec 07

We've been testing video upload support on Rentability and we're now making it available to all advertisers. This means that while building your advert, wherever you can attach a photo you can now upload and attach a video too! Right now we support uploads in MPEG, AVI and QuickTime format. We'll add support for more formats later. Oh, and uploaded video file size is currently limited to 100 megabytes.

We were visited this morning by a lovely man called Dr. Henry, from British Columbia. He was obviously very keen to go on holiday, but pathologically indecisive about where he wanted to actually go - the poor chap was so confused he ended up sending out hundreds of enquiries for different properties.

Except, depressingly predictably, Dr. Henry turned out to be from Nigeria and his enquiries (though very polite) were quite obviously scams.

We've been working on solutions to the scamming problem recently, and there's been some discussion on the Rentability property-owner forums about what to do. This has spurred us on a bit, so expect some action soon.

If you were one of those who received a message from Dr. Henry we apologise for the inconvenience - you can claim your credits back in the usual way by just clicking the refund request button on the enquiry in your dashboard.

As of yesterday, entering pricing tariffs for Rentability properties just got much more flexible. Owners wanted to enter weekly rates but to have a flexible changeover day - you can now do this (just choose 'Flexible' from the changeover day selector).

The option to enter a price range (dependent on occupancy level, amount of deposit etc) rather than a fixed price was also requested so we have the option for price ranges for weekly or daily price rules:

Also, some owners didn't want to use date ranges (rental seasons) and just wanted to quickly enter a minimum and maximum price that their property rents for regardless of date. Well now you can. You can create a daily or weekly tariff and just enter minimum and maximum prices:

Price chart rendering has also been improved - we decided it made more sense to show a yearly view (actually, we have extra space so it's 14 months). So while building a tariff, you can see everything that's going on and potential clients can see at a glance how an owners prices change over an entire year.

A weekly price chart:

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).