Big changes with Craigslist!
For over a decade Craigslist has been a great tool for buying and selling used furniture, tools, cars, clothing, and even homes. As little as 5 years ago Craigslist was the premier tool used to find an apartment, offering a free means for real estate agents to post advertisements and connect with potential future tenants. However, over the course of the last couple years Craigslist had become a swamp of duplicate postings and fake ads, making it extremely time consuming and difficult to sort through all the riff raff in order to find a legitimate apartment listing. Real estate brokers were taking advantage of the free ability to post ads, and would encourage agents and office administrators to keep hitting that “Post Ad” button hundreds of times a day, in hopes to keep their ads fresh at the top of the first search page. In addition to the Craigslist apartment search page becoming a needle in a haystack scenario, other companies like Zillow and Apartments.com have taken over a huge portion of the apartment search engine market share.
So what is Craigslist to do in order to take back their throne as the #1 apartment search site? On 12/5/19 Craigslist began charging $5 per post for all real estate ads. A declining search site is now going to start charging their users to post ads!? Seems counter intuitive at first, but it could have a less obvious impact. By charging for posts, they will quickly eliminate any real estate agents mass posting ads, as that would not be cost effective. It may also encourage agents to post ads of their most attractive listings, in order to reap the highest return on their $5 investment. The week after going live with the “pay for post” model, the number of apartment listings in “Jamaica Plain, MA” search decreased from 1573 to 103! After being live for over a month with the new model, the search results in JP have only increased to 158.
Has Craigslist succeeded in created a premium apartment rental search site with their new business model, or have they dug their own grave and effectively handed over their search traffic to the likes of Zillow? Only time will tell.
