The 12 niches I chose for my rank and rent portfolio

...and others that are good too

Author

Ian H
October 03, 2024

In case you missed my last email, I’m starting a rank and rent portfolio. I purchased 12 exact match domains targeting the best rank and rent industries + cities I could find based on extensive research.

Some of you wanted me to share what niches I chose.

For better or worse, I’ve decided to share them. I’m not sharing the cities I picked though lol.

The 12 industries I chose

  1. Artificial grass/turf - mostly popular in the southern and western US. Artificial grass costs $10-$20 per square foot. For a 1,000 square foot yard, that would be $10,000-$20,000. Very high ticket service. I know for a fact that people are signing lucrative rank and rent deals in this space.

  2. Emergency electrician - low search volume, but perfect type of niche for rank and rent. Target an area with a decent population (100K+) and you can definitely generate plenty of leads and hopefully sign a renter (source).

  3. Gutter installation - the cost range for gutter installation in the US is $1,500-$5,000 on average. Very high value niche, without a lot of competition. Also Nick Wood (who apparently makes $125K/mo from his rank and rent portfolio) recommends it. I found a couple of his gutter installation sites too, and um… yeah. He’s banking.

  4. Concrete - high-ticket service every city in the world needs. Another one of Nick’s recommended niches.

  5. Epoxy flooring - high-ticket. Not a ton of serach volume, but in larger cities you can do very well. Lots of people want garage floor upgrades!

  6. Stamped/decorative concrete - also high-ticket. Not the same as the general concrete niche. People use decorative concrete for patios and walkways, and regular concrete for stuff like driveways and sidewalks.

  7. Stucco repair - costs $10-$50 per square foot, and higher if there’s water damage. An average stucco repair project costs $21,000. Talk about high ticket!

  8. Tree service - high search volume, fairly high-ticket niche. Nick recommends this as well and said he’s done well in cities you’d never consider.

  9. Sealcoating - I was simply very curious to try this niche in a fairly large city. Low search volume, not as high-ticket as many on this list, but the competition is weak.

  10. Lawn care - Low ticket, high search volume. I chose a decent-sized city with little competition. Sub-niche of landscaping, which I’ve seen many people have success in.

  11. Junk removal - companies usually charge $100-$500+ per junk removal job depending on the load size. Pretty high search volume and will always be in demand. Besides, I just love the junk removal niche. Seems like the perfect “sweaty startup” where you can make a living wage in year one with just a truck (and maybe a buddy or two). Junk removal companies often struggle to get enough leads, so I’d love to help. 🙂 

  12. Basement waterproofing - Very high-ticket - costs $3,000-$10,000 on average. Low comeptition, but also low search volume. I chose a fairly large area that sees a lot of rain.

And there you have it! I started with a list of 30+ good rank and rent niches, and narrowed it down to those twelve.

The other niches I considered were:

  1. Window tinting

  2. Water damage repair

  3. Towing

  4. Pool service

  5. Plumbers

  6. Pest control

  7. Mold removal/remediation

  8. Landscaping

  9. HVAC

  10. House cleaning

  11. Heating and cooling

  12. Garage door repair

  13. Fencing

  14. Dumpster rental

  15. Drain cleaning

  16. Deck builders

  17. Appliance repair

  18. Air duct cleaning

  19. AC repair

  20. Spray foam insulation

Some of these have overlap (plumbing and drain cleaning, HVAC, heating and cooling, and AC repair). But in many cases, it’s better to just target a sub-niche as the competition is weaker and the buyer intent is higher.

There are lots of other great niches for rank and rent besides those 32, by the way. Pretty much any service where someone comes out to your home (or business) to perform the work is a perfect rank and rent opportunity.

When choosing a niche, you should also make sure to choose a city where the population is large enough to generate enough consistent leads. For some things like plumbing and HVAC, a population of 30,000 is fine. But for others, like basement waterproofing or stamped concrete, you’d want to target an area with at least 100,000+.

The best way to quickly see whether there would be enough lead volume for a service in a particular location is to check the monthly search volume. You can use a free tool like Keywords Everywhere or Keyword Surfer for this. Search volume estimates are oftentimes way off, even showing 0 for some keywords that actually get searched thousands of times. But they do serve as a good guide and are better than blindly guessing. With that said, I mainly targeted keywords with 100+ monthly search volume.

To help with niche selection, I made a spreadsheet that includes every combination of all 1,194 US cities above a 30,000 population, and 72 different rank and rent industries.

Rank and rent niche finder spreadsheet

In total, the spreadsheet includes over 85,000 city + service combinations.

I also collected the search volume, CPC, and estimated competition level for all 85,000+ target keywords.

This spreadsheet is like a cheatsheet for finding the perfect rank and rent niche. Using it, you don’t have to think of a service and then think of a city on your own. You can just filter and sort it to only show cities above a certain population, or keywords above a certain search volume, etc. and very quickly find opportunities that match your criteria.

If you want, you can buy access to the spreadsheet for a one-time payment of $49. Here’s the link.

Hope this was helpful!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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