This Guy Rents Out 232 Websites for R3.14 Million ($192,500) a Month. Would It Work in SA?

Luke Vander builds small, hyper-local SEO websites targeting underserved city-plus-service combinations (think WoodsideTowing.com), ranks them on Google, then rents the leads to local business owners. He now runs 232 of these sites, spends 2-3 hours a week on them, and pulled in R3.14 million ($192,500) last month.

The idea

Luke builds small, content-heavy WordPress sites for specific service-and-city combinations he's identified as underserved, a towing company site for a 60,000-person town with no local competitor doing SEO, for example. He picks niches with a narrow sweet spot: high enough ticket value to be worth renting, but small enough that he can reach the actual business owner by phone rather than a gatekeeper (towing, tree service, pest control, radon mitigation, concrete). He avoids low-ticket work like lawn mowing, contract-locked industries like elevator repair, and gatekept ones like HVAC or plumbing. He ranks each site with deep service-page content and a Google Business Profile listing, then once leads are flowing, calls the business owner and offers to send customers for a cut. Early sites charged a flat monthly fee (~$500-700); his biggest clients have since shifted to a 15-25% revenue share, which meaningfully increased his income.

Business fit breakdown

• Skills required: Marketing/SEO is the real core skill here, keyword research, on-page structure, content strategy, Google Business Profile optimization, and it has a genuine learning curve unlike more beginner-friendly ideas. Content Creation matters heavily (Luke's rule of thumb: out-write every competitor's page by several times over). Sales shows up in the rental negotiation phase, cold-calling business owners and eventually negotiating revenue-share terms.
• Time commitment: Front-loaded per site. Building and ranking a new site takes real upfront work and 2-4 months before it produces leads worth renting out, so early on it behaves like a part-time project. Once ranked and rented, each site becomes close to fully passive, Luke's entire 232-site portfolio takes him 2-3 hours a week.
• Execution difficulty: Picking the right underserved niche-and-city combination is the hard part, avoiding saturated categories, contract-locked industries, and gatekept ones, while still finding enough real search volume to be worth the effort. Vetting and negotiating with business owners (eventually requesting CRM or QuickBooks access for revenue-share deals) adds a trust-building layer most technical SEO people don't have.
• Go-to-market: Slower and two-sided compared to other ideas: you have to rank the site first (2-4 months minimum), then separately find and vet a business owner willing to pay for those leads. That second step relies on cold outreach to a very specific type of business, not just anyone in your existing network.
• Revenue potential: SA local SEO agency retainers run R1,380-R2,995/month for ongoing service, a reasonable proxy for what a business owner would pay to rent a similar volume of leads, likely R1,500-R4,000/month per site depending on niche and ticket size. A portfolio of 20-30 rented sites, a fraction of Luke's 232, works out to R30,000-R120,000/month. Matching his full scale would take years of compounding, not a fast ramp.

Would it work in SA?

This is already being replicated locally, not a gap. MegaLeads SA and MyLocalSites.co.za both run rank-and-rent lead-gen sites for South African local service businesses using the same underlying playbook: build a geo-plus-niche website, rank it organically and on Google Maps, then rent the leads to a local business for a monthly fee. What's still true, same as in the US: the opportunity was never really the category, it's finding specific underserved city-and-service combinations, and South Africa likely has fewer of these than the US, given a smaller population spread across far fewer mid-size towns, and fewer local service businesses running paid ads (Luke's own signal for a serious buyer). The mechanics translate directly, WordPress, local SEO, and Google Business Profile all work the same way here, but expect a longer ramp and real competition already established at the agency level.

Source: This Guy Rents Out 232 Websites for R3.14 Million ($192,500) a Month. Would It Work in SA? — Chris Koerner, The Koerner Office Podcast