Craigslist Real Estate Scraper — FSBO, Rentals & Off-Market Property Data

Extract real estate listings from Craigslist — for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) homes, rentals, rooms, sublets and vacation properties — as clean, structured data with an AI lead score on every listing. It's the off-market inventory that never reaches Zillow or Realtor.com: direct-from-owner deals with no MLS gatekeepers. Export to JSON/CSV/Excel, run on a schedule, call via API, or pipe into Make / Zapier / n8n.

Transparent pricing: $0.02 per returned listing plus a $0.00005 actor-start event per GB of run memory (at least one). At the standard 512 MB setting, 10 listings cost about $0.20005 before account discounts.

🏠 What is the Craigslist Real Estate Scraper?

It turns any Craigslist real-estate search into a structured dataset. Give it a city (and optional filters for FSBO, price, bedrooms or a postal-code radius) and it returns every matching listing with full details, photos, contact availability and a 0–100 lead score that ranks the best opportunities first — so agents, investors and property managers can work the hottest leads without manual browsing.

What data does it extract?

• Price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and property attributes
• Title & full description (body text)
• Location, map coordinates and the exact posting time (spot fresh listings)
• Up to 20 photos per listing
• FSBO flag (by_owner) — by-owner vs agent/dealer
• Contact availability, the reply link, the Craigslist post ID and the listing URL
• AI lead score (0–100) ranking lead quality

⬇️ Input

Run it two ways — search a city with filters, or pass exact listing URLs:

Field	Description
mode	search (by city + filters) or direct_urls
city	Craigslist city code, e.g. sfbay, newyork, losangeles, chicago
category	apa (apartments/rent), rea (for sale), roo (rooms), sub (sublets), vac (vacation)
listingType	all, owner (FSBO only), or dealer
minPrice / maxPrice / minBedrooms	Standard filters
postalCode + searchDistance	Radius search around a ZIP
maxListings	Cap the run (1–500)
includePhotos / includeContactInfo / includeLeadScore	Toggle extras

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "city": "sfbay",
  "category": "rea",
  "listingType": "owner",
  "minPrice": 200000,
  "maxPrice": 900000,
  "minBedrooms": 2,
  "maxListings": 100,
  "includeLeadScore": true
}

⬆️ Output

Every listing is one clean row (view as a table, or export JSON / CSV / Excel):

{
  "url": "https://www.craigslist.org/view/d/san-francisco-2br-condo-for-sale-by/abc123",
  "post_id": "7976797995",
  "title": "2BR Condo — For Sale By Owner, Mission District",
  "price": 825000,
  "bedrooms": 2,
  "bathrooms": 1,
  "sqft": 950,
  "location": "24th St near Mission St",
  "latitude": 37.7522,
  "longitude": -122.4184,
  "posting_date": "2026-10-02T10:38:41-0700",
  "photos": ["https://images.craigslist.org/..."],
  "body": "Charming 2 bedroom condo with hardwood floors...",
  "attributes": ["2BR / 1Ba", "950ft2", "condo", "w/d in unit"],
  "reply_link": "https://sfbay.craigslist.org/reply/sfo/reo/7976797995",
  "by_owner": true,
  "housing_type": "/ 2br - 950ft2 -",
  "contact_available": true,
  "lead_score": 84,
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-26T15:30:00.000Z"
}

💡 Use cases

• 🎯 Agents — FSBO lead generation: find owners selling without an agent (a warm listing-appointment lead) before competitors do.
• 💰 Investors — off-market deals: motivated, un-bid-up sellers and distressed properties for flips and wholesale.
• 🏢 Property managers & landlords: benchmark rental rates, amenities and vacancy by neighborhood.
• 📊 Market research: track pricing and supply trends across cities over time.

🧮 How the lead score works

A transparent 0–100 score combining FSBO status (by-owner = best lead), listing quality (photos + contact info), property value (price & size) and completeness. 80–100 = hot lead, 60–79 = good, 40–59 = average. Use it to sort and work the best opportunities first.

❓ FAQ

How do I scrape Craigslist real estate listings? Pick a city code and optional filters (FSBO, price, bedrooms, radius), then Run. You get structured listings with price, beds, baths, photos, contact info, FSBO detection and a lead score.

Can I get For Sale By Owner (FSBO) leads? Yes — set listingType: owner to keep only by-owner listings; each is flagged and scored.

Does it cover rentals too? Yes — apartments, rooms, sublets and vacation rentals, as well as homes for sale.

Do I need an API key or login? No. It reads public Craigslist data — just give it a city and filters.

How do I find my city code? It's the subdomain on craigslist.org (e.g. sfbay.craigslist.org). Popular: sfbay, newyork, losangeles, chicago, seattle, boston, miami, austin, denver, sandiego.

Can I search a specific ZIP area? Yes — set postalCode and searchDistance (miles) for a radius search.

How many listings can it return? Up to your maxListings cap of 500 per run. One Craigslist results page lists about 350 postings; for more, the Actor reads the same search in other sort orders and saves each posting once.

How fast is it? The Actor reads Craigslist's pages directly, without a browser. A 40-listing search finishes in about 10 seconds and 500 listings take about three minutes.

What if a search finds nothing, or the city code is wrong? The run finishes without rows and the status message says why. Only the start fee is charged.

What happens with a short timeout or a spending limit? The run stops cleanly before its time limit, or when your maximum charge is used up. The listings saved so far stay in the dataset and the status message says why it stopped.

Can I run it on a schedule or via API? Yes — schedule recurring runs in Apify, call it via the API/SDK, or connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n.

Is scraping Craigslist legal? It extracts publicly available listing data. Use it responsibly for research and lead generation, and follow applicable laws and Craigslist's terms.

🔗 You might also like

• FSBO Real Estate Scraper — for-sale-by-owner listings
• Zumper Rental Scraper — Zumper rentals
• Redfin Scraper — homes for sale, rent & sold
• OnTheMarket Scraper — UK property listings

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Keywords: Craigslist scraper, Craigslist real estate scraper, FSBO leads, for sale by owner, real estate lead generation, off-market properties, rental listings scraper, Craigslist API, property data, real estate investor leads, motivated sellers, Zillow alternative data.

Workflow and data quality

For best results, run this actor as part of a repeatable data pipeline rather than a one-off scrape. Start with a focused input, export the dataset to CSV or JSON, and keep a stable unique field such as URL, ID, domain, package name or title as your deduplication key. Schedule the same task daily or weekly when you need monitoring, then compare each new dataset with the previous run to identify fresh records, removed records and changed fields.

The output is designed to be practical for business workflows: spreadsheets, dashboards, enrichment steps, alerts, CRM imports and lightweight internal APIs. Null values mean the source did not provide that field, not that the actor guessed. For larger projects, combine this actor with related Apify scrapers and use the shared URL/company/domain fields to build a richer dataset without manual copy-paste work.