Thread: Craigslist real estate API?

Does anyone know if Craigslist has an API for mass real estate uploads?

Some sites like Point2 offer syndication to craiglist amongst other points. So there must be such an API/way to automate submitting. Doubt there's a captcha.

Yeah, there are a few sites out there doing it....just trying to figure out how!! It would make my life a lot easier..haha

While it may be possible, Craigslist really frowns on autosubmission services and I believe it is against the TOU. Before you start flooding Craigslist, I would read the TOU and understand the penalties for such behavior. Plus the Craigslsit anti spam self policing people will make your life hell, possibly even getting your IP address banned. I am sure you can find a way around this, but if pushed too many times you may find yourself ruining a good thing not just for yourself but others.

I'm not really looking 'to get around' anything. However I do intend to advertise my customers homes by owner on Craigslist...if they don't want actual home submissions then I'm not sure why they would have that category. I do not wish to promote my website...just the particular home with a link to it on the site

Thanks for your warning, I'll be careful on how I go about things.

There is what's known as 'screen scrapping', where basically your script/application loads the web page with listings/links, parses the html, reads everything between say <a href= and </a> tags, and outputs the text (i.e.) the links into a database or formats them on-screen.

Most often such snippets that do this process are written in PHP or Perl, using the regex function to parse the stuff.

Re: being banned. I don't think a website like craiglist would ban the IP if another site scrapes the stuff. The reason being that the script would read the html page only once, then manipulating the data in its home directory or whatever. And once is akin to 'GET' used by every browser, so....

what things should i follow so my site not banned from google while faming it in search engines

Originally Posted by majidpucit123

what things should i follow so my site not banned from google while faming it in search engines

light a candle and resite the rosary whilest its 'faming'

They are/were several site for sale on ebay with CL API.
At $0.99, they are quite cheap...
I also have one using Trulia API. Well, they are so many thing out there these days...

I think I found the best solution...generate the source code for the users so they can post it themselves. What do you folks think? That keeps my website and IP address from getting banned and would also let them feel like they are selling it themselves too.