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.
