Use Your Social Graph To Rent A Vacation Home With Second Porch

There are a vast amount of sites, such as VRBO, that serve as a platform for owners to rent out their vacation homes to vacation goers. But the main drawback to these sites is the risk of renting your home to someone who you don’t know or have any personal connection with. Second Porch hopes to mitigate this problem with its Facebook app that lets owners create a free property listing that can be broadcast to your Facebook friends.

The app is fairly simple. Once you list a property via Second Porch’s application, this will be published in your feed with a link to the listing. The app itself aggregates all listings onto a map (owners can also choose to let anyone on Facebook see their listings) and lets people search for rentals by location, rate or amenities. And of course, you can search or filter by properties owned by friends. Currently, the app has over 700 listings for rental properties.

Second Porch plans to introduce a paid service which requires owners to pay $99 per year to provide additional marketing for the listings including redirecting your inquiry stream to a property manage and let owners link to information like a Flickr photo album, another Facebook page, a property web site and a Twitter profile.

I think the app is fairly useful and I like the idea of using your social graph to both advertise and find rental properties. If the app is able to gain a solid user base, it could prove to be a popular destination to both advertise and find rental properties.