The January Hitwise real estate rankings list had one big surprise: Rental search engine RentBits jumped from number 126 in December to 75 in January. We asked the company why. Rentbits founder and CEO Dan Daugherty told us by e-mail that, coming from Google, the company takes the philosphy of users first, constantly asking and welcoming feedback from users and advertisers.

Some of the things RentBits is focused on, as e-mailed by Daughtery:

“1) Speed – As a rental search engine, we want to ensure results are loaded as quickly as possible.
“2) Comprehensiveness – Our index currently has over 500,000 active available rentals. We aggregate this data from over 400 different sources.
“3) Rental Rate Date – Our users asked for rental rate data and we released average rental rates for over 4000 cities in the US. We have collected data from the last two years across 9,000,000 rentals to show historical rental rates by month.
“4) Neighborhood Search – Our uses wanted the ability to search by neighborhoods. For example, if someone were moving to Denver and wanted to be in Washington Park. They can now search for Washington Park, CO and get listings in that area -
“5) Network Distribution for Advertisers – For our advertisers, we launched a distribution service that syndicates their rental listings to over 100 different rental sites with one push of the button.”

Daughterty told us that more than 90% of all renters search across multiple rental sites looking for their ideal rental. “Our goal at rentBits is to organize all of the World’s rental information and solve the problem of online rental fragmentation for both renters and advertisers,” he said.

The top 10 real estate sites, according to Hitwise rankings for January are

1. Realtor.com

2. Yahoo Real Estate

3. Zillow

4. Rent.com

5. ZipRealty

6. Trulia

7. Homes.com

8. ServiceMagic

9. MSN Real Estate

10. MyNewPlace

Here’s the complete January category report [PDF).