Overnight News: The art of managing Zillow’s all-but-useless rental “leads.”

We market our rental properties with the Realty.bots, not the MLS. I want to meet everyone, and I don’t want to pay a weak agent to come between me and the prospects.

But what that means is that I get inundated with inquiries: The Realty.bots make it easy for unmotivated people to express interest in properties they won’t trouble themselves to visit. Oh well. I respond by form letter and schedule group appointments – Open Houses without the ballyhoo.

Of the people who inquire – meaning who click a button on Zillow.com or another site – about 10% will commit to keeping the appointment, and, of those, around half actually will. That’s good news, right? Only nineteen out of twenty Realty.bot rental “leads” are complete crap.

The people who do come are great – because they are actually motivated. About half of them will apply, which is a great conversion rate on lousy yields, but still wrong: With only one house at a time available to lease, we end up working only the best-qualified applications. I triage them as they come in, pushing the red flag DQs – recent bankruptcy, landlord debt, dubious income – to the side. The one argument I can make for an application fee is inducing marginally-qualified people to think twice before applying.

So: Zillow-like rental “leads” are crap, except for the small few who convert, among whom are amazingly well-qualified folks who just want to lease a house amidst the maelstrom. But: Even with all of that, for our purposes, listing rentals on the Realty.bots is far better than using the MLS.

In other news:

CNBC: This woman got $10,000 for moving from Brooklyn to Tulsa. Here’s how it worked out.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homes Keep Selling Faster Than Ever—Typical Home Sold in Just 18 Days. Redfin will have to double-down on the little-riot-lies soon: We’re ten days away from the anniversary of the onset of the biggest run on fee simple housing in American history, and there is no way to evade it without looking like even bigger liars.

CNBC: San Francisco tech companies are sitting on record amounts of empty office space and offering perks to lure tenants.

Zero Hedge: Nearly 800 Barges Stuck In Lower Mississippi River From Bridge Crack.

The Federalist: How A Year Of Unfounded, Contradictory CDC Guidelines Destroyed That Agency’s Credibility Forever.

American Thinker: Skills Not Schools: Lessons from the Renaissance.