Future of Real Estate Marketing » craigslist

Craigslist Not Responsible for Discriminatory Housing Ads

Joel Burslem — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:48:47 +0000

From Ars Technica, a judge rules in favor of Craigslist in discriminatory housing ads case, saying

It is not a “publisher” of housing ads, but merely a provider of online “interactive services,” and therefore is not liable for the content of users’ posts under the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

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Two Easy Steps Towards Mastering Craiglist

Joel Burslem — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:03:16 +0000

Craigslist is the undisputed king in the online classifieds market. Its marketplace has a depth and scope that very few other sites can even come close to matching. As amazing as the site is however, there are a few little roadblocks that the site throws up in front of you if you really want to get the most out of your searches there. Luckily – these are easily overcome using a couple of other free tools.

One of my minor annoyances with craigslist is when you want to move beyond a simple query in a single city. Unfortunately – the way craigslist is designed, it requires you navigate to a whole new site every time you want to see a new city’s postings.

Thankfully, craigslist provides feeds of each of its search results pages. So if you are trying to keep an eye on real estate listings from a number of different cities or counties for example, by using a customizable RSS aggregator like FeedRaider – you can put all of those feeds on a single page.

Check out this sample page I made for real estate listings in Oregon.

Using this method you can stay on top of the newest postings from each of the areas you’ve identified.You could do this in separate markets, showing different prices ranges, different types of housing – the options are virtually limitless.

While not especially hard to navigate – the one thing Craigslist definitely is not, is pretty to look at. Thankfully, there are a number of other sites out there that can help relieve grey and blue tedium of Craigslist’s pages.

Transparent Real Estate blog recently reminded me of one my favorites that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. Listpic is a site that let’s you navigate through craiglist’s postings using the thumbnail images associated with each listing. Clicking on any of the thumbnails displays the full text of the details as well as any additional photos. Very cool.

Though the images are small, I find scanning through them is much easier than lines of text. Plus, since I rarely bother exploring any listings that don’t include pictures, this site acts as a sort of filter for me right off the bat.

So whether it’s for real estate or other needs, these two tools can really help you managing the results of your craigslist searches. Used individually or in conjunction with each other, they definitely are two easy steps you can take to take your craigslist experience to a whole new level.

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vFlyer Posts Your Listings For You

Joel Burslem — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:27:43 +0000

vFlyer is a new startup that aims to help you create a virtual flyer and post it to online classifieds sites like Google Base, Oodle and Craigslist, as well as to a number of other paid sites too. It’s very similar to the service Postlets.com already provides, but adds a number of unique features.

Like Postlets, vFlyer allows you to use a number of very nice templates to display items for sale or listed properties. (e.g., Beautiful Pacific Heights Flat for Vacation Rental). Creating a vFlyer is very simple, just a matter of filling in a number of fields with the appropriate information. The whole process takes little time and is very straightforward. Using vFlyer, anyone can easily have a professional looking listing ad in minutes.

Hitting the publish button automatically creates a unique URL for your listing and sends it out to all of vFlyers partner sites, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to be more selective about which sites you can send it to. Right now, it seems to be an all-or-nothing approach. vFlyer does give you some bookmarklets and the raw HTML code that will allow you to post your listing to other sites (eBay, craigslist) – but overall this solution seems a little kludgey to me.

Once you’ve published your listing however, vFlyer has a number of advanced feautres you can use, including sending your listing to more people via email or downloading it as a HTML or PDF document (which you could then use in your flyer boxes). On the backend, once your vFlyers are live, their statistics tab gives you traffic statistics on all your published listings for analysis. This is all pretty slick.

One very cool thing is that vFlyer is partnering with RapLeaf, an online reputation service which I wrote about earlier, so that Realtors can market and benefit from their online reputations.

vFlyer is currently in Beta, so creating a flyer and using the service is currently free. No word on whether they plan on charging for the service in the future.

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Where to Put Your Listings Online

Joel Burslem — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:50:31 +0000

Newspapers ad spending is still strong, but for how much longer?

According to the NAA’s print classified ads breakdown, real estate ads jumped 18.5 percent to $1.2 billion.

While print still has a stranglehold on most local advertising dollars – I suspect it won’t for very much longer. Traffic to online classifieds web sites is booming right now, according to new report from Comscore. Over 37.4 million internet users visited an online classified site in the past year. It should be no surprise to anyone then that real estate classifieds are moving online.

Craigslist is the uncontested category killer, but Oodle was a surprising ninth place finisher with a startling 463% growth figure. edgeio, another of the new crop of classifieds sites, is nowhere to be found however.

In any case, getting your listing onto any of the sites is great marketing exposure for your listing. Remember, you can also use postlets to help you submit your ad to these and many more sites.