For most people, Zillow is synonymous with online real estate listings, but the company has recently focused quite a bit on rentals as well. Today, it is launching a new mobile app for rental professionals that will allow them to create, manage and distribute their listings through the company’s newly launched Postlets app for iOS.
Just like Zillow’s regular web-based Postlets service, the new mobile app allows its users to create listings and manage them on the fly. Using the service, landlords can distribute their listings to more than 20 real estate sites. These include all of Zillow’s own sites, as well as services like HotPads, Yahoo Homes, Zumper and – as of earlier this month – AOL Real Estate (TechCrunch is owned by AOL). The service also lets users publish listings on Craigslist, though given that service’s idiosyncrasies, it takes a few extra steps to get a listing onto that site.
The app allows rental pros to make use of their smartphones to upload photos, too, and users can create lists of the available amenities in their homes and the descriptions that accompany their listings. All of this, Zillow says, is meant to help property managers to “quickly create, distribute and manage their rental listings on the go, and eliminates the cumbersome trudge back to the office desktop.”
Zillow acquired Postlets back in early 2011 and kept the brand alive ever since. After it acquired RentJuice, a more fully featured service for rental professionals, in 2012, it soon rebranded that service as Zillow Rentals. Going forward, Postlets will remain Zillow’s service for landlords who manage the rentals of a small portfolio of houses, while Zillow Rentals Pro will remain aimed at companies that manage apartment complexes.
Zillow Rentals Pro also offers a mobile app, but compared to the new Postlets App, the Rental Pro app goes beyond listings and also features tools for managing inventories, managing applications, leases and more.
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