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Wow! The following (from an apparent insider) showed up on a comment to a recent post.

Everyone,

As you know, effective April 3rd our Standard and Featured ads will increase in price. In addition, we will no longer offer Money Back Guarantees or Free Yard Signs. The yard signs will now sell for $19.95 each.

We want our customers to know that change is good and that we’re constantly working to offer them newer and better features and tools, but change is not always easy so we’ll be offering special pricing for the month of April only. The regularly priced $69 Featured ads will be available at the discount price of just $59.

Since these changes come right after Jamie Cylmer’s entrance I am guessing he is the one writing this memo.

That makes me laugh, “We want our customers to know that change is good“. I am not sure I would want to sell that idea to my customers that a price hike is good. I wonder it Robert Metz knows what Jamie Cylmer is doing.

I want to know what the “better features and tools” are - does that include translating the listing to Spanish? That is the only new feature I have noticed in a long time. Are the reps informing the property managers of the higher prices and then softening the blow by telling them that their listing can be translated for an extra fee?

Again, I can’t confirm this post. But, if true, this is huge. Why is it huge? Because in the Internet world, just like the computer industry prices go down not up - it is almost a death sentence to raise prices.

I can tell you as a rental listing site owner, the pricing has little to do with the companies expenses. The price is determined by what the market can bare.

I have very little expenses so it would be very difficult for me to go out of business. I would guess the majority of Rentals.com expenses are in salaries and rent. In my company there is just one employee (me) and I work out of my house. Just think if I were the #1 ranked site in the US, I could actually lower prices and kill off CSI.

I am watching the Rentals.com site today to see what happens.

I wonder what David Borden would think of what is happening to his old company? David Borden is the one that set the pricing for the whole industry when he started RentClicks.com. The $39 price was determined from one lost day of rent on an average-priced rental.

By the way, you can list with RentVine for the low low price of $38 a listing!! And that is for 40 days not 30.