We all have that one friend who somehow has the perfect apartment in the hottest neighborhood, yet pays way under market rate. While staring through the window of your tiny place, you wonder: how the heck did they find it? Sure, there’s a lot of luck involved, but what if there was a way to increase your odds of finding that gem? Or, in other words, identify that “golden hour” to search for an apartment.
Here at Zumper we have two main products – our consumer side, a home and apartment platform that let’s you search and apply, and Zumper Pro, our real estate professionals tool. One feature of Zumper Pro is the ability to post a rental, and have that listing syndicated out to every major rental site. Think of it as a “one and done” solution. What this means is a huge number of listings originate on our site first, even if they eventually show up on others.
This is important as we not only have a huge database of listings, but also the exact times when these listings are uploaded. Using this set, we analyzed the last 30,000 rental postings from the end of 2014 to find the optimal time to search for an apartment.
Supply:
Distribution of Rental Postings By Day
Looking purely at supply, the most popular days by far to post are Monday and Tuesday, with 32% and 21% of all rental listings, respectively. By comparison, only 13% are posted on Fridays, and 3% on Saturdays.
Distribution of Rental Postings By Hour
Analyzing posting times by hour shows that the sweet spot comes, unsurprisingly, during working hours. Overall posting is highest between 10am – 7pm, with particular jumps between 12pm – 1pm, when 14% of apartments are posted, and 6 – 7pm, when 10% of apartments are posted.
Demand:
To get an idea of demand, our total site traffic by day was analyzed to get a sense of when most people search for apartments.
Site Traffic By Day
As the chart above shows, traffic is highest at the start of the week, with a gradual decline through Sunday, when a slight bounce back occurs. That being said, it’s important to note that despite this decline, numbers are not dramatically different across days. For example, the absolute difference between Monday (17.36%) and Sunday (12.56%) is relatively minor.
Conclusion:
So, what can we draw from this? At a broad level, the best days to search for a place are Monday and Tuesday, where 53% of all listings are created, yet only 33% of weekly traffic occurs. Furthermore, searching in the early afternoon between 12pm and 6pm provides the best inventory to browse. But, is there an optimal time to search so that you can actually close this apartment? Because, seeing it first doesn’t actually mean you’ll snag it, right?
To do that, you have to look into the habits of the the broker/landlord as well.
Give a thought as to the typical schedule of a broker. As we discussed earlier, most brokers will post listings earlier in the week, and then schedule the bulk of apartment showings for the weekend. Most brokers also will generally work a typical 8-10 hour day, starting around 9am through, say, 7pm.
To truly upstream the competition, you’ll have to not only see the apartment first, but also reach out and schedule a showing before the rest. This requires you to send a message when the broker is highly responsive, and earlier in the week before these weekend showings take place.
The perfect time occurs during the overlap of a broker’s work day and our optimal times noted earlier. As most postings are uploaded on Monday and Tuesday afternoon, it is best to search between 12pm and 3pm on these days, and message the landlord to schedule a showing ASAP – or at least before the weekend.
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