I think I had posted a Craigslist ad a while back that I was using with a phrase in the headline “I’m a Jerk.” In it I had gone through all of the things that would prevent people from being able to purchase one of my homes. (pit bulls, prior evictions, felonies, etc.)
I tried to make it funny, and got a lot of response from it. People emailed saying it was very funny and they just had to call or email. But it worked because, even though it was written the way it was, it did do the job of screening applicants.
Those that wrote in or called were not felons, vicious dog owners, or evictees. The leads that came in were of a higher quality than what I was used to getting with Craigslist.
The problem I had with the “I’m a Jerk” ad was that it was too long. So I wrote a “How to” article at ehow.com entitled “How to completely Blow a Rental Interview.”
Basically same concept, but now I can just ad a link into the body of a craigslist ad and they can go and read the whole thing if they want to. So for fun, I figured I’d throw the link up here. If you want to use it, just ad the link into your craigslist ad and send them to the article to prescreen them. Or go to Ehow and do the same thing.
Write an article or blogpost explaining your program, then you can send interested parties to that article before having them contact you. It saves a lot of time when you do not have to respond to the people who make less in a month than your lot rent, and have four prior felonies and two evictions, because we all know that when you get one of them on the phone they have to explain everything in detail and hope that you’ll take them anyway…
Here’s the link, let me know what you think:(Just cut and paste it into your address bar)
http://www.ehow.com/how_5131651_completely-blow-rental-interview.html