No requests yet? The 15-minute listing audit
Quiet listings are rarely mysterious. Six checks find the blocker in almost every case — run them before blaming the market.
First: how long is normal?
It genuinely varies — by city, season and price band. In peak windows (bookings for September and January), well-priced listings can see requests within days. Off-season, two or three quiet weeks can be normal. The signal to act isn’t the calendar; it’s the pattern: views without saves means a price or first-photo problem; no views at all means a visibility problem.
The six checks
- Price vs neighbours (5 min): search your own neighbourhood as a tenant would. If three comparable places undercut you with better photos, you have your answer
- First photo (2 min): it’s your storefront. Brightest room, widest angle. If your best photo isn’t first, fix the order now
- Availability date (1 min): is it accurate — and is it more than 8 weeks away? Very distant dates sit outside most current searches; that’s a timing issue, not a quality one
- Minimum stay (1 min): a high minimum quietly removes most of the demand curve. Try lowering it for your first booking
- Bills setting (1 min): if comparable listings include bills and you don’t, you lose the comparison every time
- First line of the description (5 min): does it name a commute, a neighbourhood benefit, a concrete fact? Rewrite until a stranger could picture a Tuesday
Still quiet after fixing?
If you’ve run the audit, waited a week, and the listing is still silent, contact landlord support from your panel — they can see what tenants searching your area are filtering for and tell you which lever is the blocker. That’s a five-minute conversation, not a mystery to live with.
One thing not to do: don’t let the calendar drift while you wait. The first request often arrives exactly when you’ve stopped checking — and an expired request hurts the response history you’re trying to build.
Audit done?
Apply the fixes to your listing while they’re fresh.