In China in recent years, the rental housing market has boomed, but insufficient attention has been paid to microsubject tenants in the market, and there is a lack of research results on tenants’ decision-making processes. In keeping with the characteristics of China’s accommodation-renting population, this study takes as its research object graduating students, who form an important group in the housing rental market, and focuses on the information retrieval process underlying prospective tenants’ rental decisions. First, it investigates tenants’ concerns during the renting process by means of questionnaires. Second, using eye-tracking experiments, the real online renting process is simulated and tenants’ web listings are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. In the process of information search, the characteristics and rules of browsing the entry search page, the listings page, and the details page are obtained, and the factors that prospective tenants pay attention to in their search for rental information are obtained. The research results show that initial alphabetical sorting of the term search page can improve the subjects’ efficiency in locating the target keywords, the text information display area of the listings page receives more attention than others, and the real concern factors of the tenants on the page listing details are generally consistent with their selected factors but deviate slightly. Finally, the layout and display of web page information affect how subjects’ attention is distributed, and web page information presents a significant difference in attention between upper and lower pages.

Based on a questionnaire survey combining the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory with the cues theory, this paper establishes hypotheses and uses partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to study and analyse the impact of web page house listing cues on Internet rental from the perspective of users. The results indicate that: (1) the relevant cues of Internet renting platforms are effective and worthy of attention, (2) the subjective arousal of the tenants triggers their behavioural changes to a large extent, and (3) the sensitivity of the tenants’ behavioural approaches to their feelings is greater than their purchasing intentions. In the context of the rapid development of the online market, understanding the user's response to target information is essential to promote the optimisation of the Internet rental platform, to improve the efficiency of online housing selection, and to encourage healthy development of the rental housing market.