Looking for the perfect rental vacancy?
So is everyone else. Here's how to improve your chances of finding and getting that great roomshare, flatshare, apartment or house

Buy a £10 Standard advert on LetaLife.com. It is enhanced and it says to landlords that you at least can afford to pay to advertise, which suggests you may be able to pay the rent as well.

If you want to ensure your advert stays at the top of the page - you can purchase an additional 'keep on top' option when you purchase a £10 Standard advert . You can also select to 'cover the county' as an additional purchase with your Standard advert. Both options are an additional £10 each. So for £30 you can ensure that for 6 weeks you have an enhanced advert which stays above the free adverts at the top of the page and also appears on every town in the county of your choice to ensure maximum exposure for your advert.

Keep your advert short.
Most people are busy and have a lot of adverts to plough through. If you want them to speak to you so you can get a chance to find a place to live – leave them wanting more information – then they’ll call you – giving you your chance. We trim long adverts any way, unless they are too long and then we just reject them.

Stick to the facts(i). Remember to state your requirements clearly. Too many adverts go into minute detail about unimportant things without stating the most important ones. Say whether you want a house, flat, apartment, bungalow, room, (do you want a double or single?) – if you want a property how many bedrooms do you need?.

Stick to the facts(ii) Property owners are not letting their property out as a charity – they are interested in finding sensible tenants who will pay the rent on time, look after the property and cause the minimum bother. Long stories about personal or health problems are embarrassing, they will reduce the number of landlords who will feel comfortable about contacting you.

Give them what they want. Landlords want, references, reliability, deposit, no problems with rent (in fact if you can pay up front that can help a lot).

Offer to clean up and pay up(i) if you have pets. If you don’t want to deter landlords from letting to you, offer references for the pets from previous landlords and offer to pay extra bond against any possible damages and expect to pay for the property to be steam-cleaned after your tenancy. This is important even if you do not think your pet smells unpleasant - lots of non pet owners have very sensitive noses and don't like renting property with a pet odour - however slight.

Offer to clean up and pay up(ii) if you smoke. If you don’t want to deter landlords from letting to you, offer to pay for the property to be steam-cleaned after your tenancy. This is important lots of non smokers don't like renting property after smokers.

Keep a cool head. Don't refer to yourself as desperate - this may well encourage unscrupulous landlords or agents to think they can take advantage of you. You do not increase the likelihood of offers of accommodation with this sort of language - it gives the impression that you might be a difficult tenant who has problems finding accomodation and not the sort of tenant most genuine landlords or agents are looking for.

Don’t place lots of duplicate free adverts. Choose no more than three places from the nearly 2,000 UK places we cover on LetaLife.com and place only one advert per month on those three pages. We really do read all adverts and we reject duplicates so you will just be wasting your own time and ours if you try to flood the site with your advert. You wouldn’t achieve anything if you did get the adverts online anyway except to annoy our people who would then be less likely to contact you.

Keep it simple. Don’t try and make your advert interesting by weird choices of capital letters. We have a button on our system which removes all capitals any way – and we use it! If you want your advert to stand out – especially if you are advertising in a competitive area for property or rooms – splash out £10 on a standard advert on LetaLife.