Craigslist Housing Scraper

Scrape Craigslist apartments, rooms, sublets, vacation rentals, and real estate listings into a clean dataset — no login, no API key, no browser farm.

Architecture: thin Apify Actor → craigslist-com Cloud Run worker (HTTPS + API key).
Worker URL is config (WORKER_BASE_URL), not hardcoded-only — migrate the worker by updating Actor env without a code change. Set WORKER_PROVIDES_PROXY=1 when the worker supplies its own PROXY_URL.

• Search any Craigslist area slug (austin, sfbay, newyork, …) across all housing categories
• Pull price, beds, baths, sqft, photos, geo, and posting URLs from Craigslist search results
• Optionally enrich from public detail pages (JSON-LD, attributes, map address, full image lists)
• Go beyond Craigslist’s 360-result search cap with automatic sort/price sharding
• Pay only for what you use: $0.005 per run + $2.00 per 1,000 listings (plus platform usage)

Craigslist does not offer a public housing API for third-party apps. This Actor reads the same public search and listing pages people browse on Craigslist and returns structured rows you can export as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pipe into Sheets, Make, n8n, Zapier, and AI agents.

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What does the Craigslist Housing Scraper do?

This Actor is a Craigslist apartments scraper and broader Craigslist housing data extractor. Give it one or more area slugs, pick a housing category (or all), set how many listings you want, and it returns structured posting data from Craigslist search — with optional detail-page enrichment.

It is useful when you need:

• Rent and sale inventory snapshots for a city
• Room / share / sublet monitoring
• Vacation rental and parking / office commercial scans
• A Craigslist API alternative for housing research workflows

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What you can scrape from Craigslist housing

1. Scrape Craigslist apartments for rent

Monitor apartments and housing-for-rent (apa) in a target market. Filter by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, photos, or “posted today”, then download a table of listings.

2. Collect rooms, shares, and sublets

Use roo (rooms & shares) or sub (sublets & temporary) to track shared housing and short-term inventory without manually refreshing search pages.

3. Pull real estate for sale and vacation rentals

Scrape rea (real estate for sale), owner/broker shortcuts (reo / reb), or vac vacation rentals for market research and lead lists.

4. Cover every housing category in one run

Set category to all to sample across apartments, swaps, offices, parking, sale, rooms, sublets, vacation, and wanted categories with a fair per-category quota.

5. Feed housing data into AI or automation tools

Ask an AI assistant to “scrape Craigslist apartments in Austin under $2,000” — or schedule the Actor in Apify and push results into Sheets, CRM, or alerting workflows.

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How to scrape Craigslist housing listings

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console.
2. Enter one or more Craigslist area slugs (for example austin).
3. Choose a housing category (default: apartments / housing for rent).
4. Set Max listings and whether to enrich from detail pages.
5. Click Start and download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Free Apify plan limits (set by this Actor's developer)

Limit	Free Apify plan	Paid Apify plan
Runs of this Actor	10 runs total	Unlimited
Listings per run (maxItems)	Up to 1,000	Up to 2,000

These caps are enforced by the Actor developer (not Apify platform errors). When you hit the 10-run limit, the run finishes gracefully with a clear status message asking you to upgrade.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
locations	string[]	["austin"]	Craigslist area slugs used in search URLs
category	string	apa	Housing category code, or all
purveyor	string	(all)	For sale: blank / owner / dealer
query	string	—	Optional keyword query
minPrice / maxPrice	integer	—	Price / rent bounds
minBedrooms / maxBedrooms	integer	—	Bedroom filters
minBathrooms / maxBathrooms	integer	—	Bathroom filters (SAPI)
hasPic	boolean	false	Only listings with photos
postedToday	boolean	false	Only postings published today
sort	string	date	date, dateoldest, priceasc, pricedsc
startUrls	request list	—	Optional search or detail URLs
maxItems	integer	50	Max listings (1–2000); free users capped at 1,000/run + 10 runs total
scrapeDetails	boolean	true	Enrich from public detail pages
maxDetailConcurrency	integer	5	Parallel detail fetches (1–15)
imageSize	string	600x450	Search image size suffix
requestDelayMillis	integer	250	Politeness delay between requests
proxyConfiguration	object	proxy off	Optional Apify Proxy

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Output

Each dataset item is one Craigslist housing posting. Core fields include:

Field	Description
postingId	Craigslist posting ID
title	Listing title
price	Numeric price when available
category	Housing category code
location / city	Area / city signals
bedrooms / bathrooms / sqft	Unit facts when present
url	Public listing URL
postedAt	Posting timestamp when available
source	Always craigslist
images / geo / detail fields	Present when search or detail enrichment provides them

Key-value store artifacts:

• INPUT_ECHO — normalized public input
• RUN_SUMMARY (and SUMMARY) — run stats and shard notes
• ERROR_SUMMARY — written when the run fails

Empty result sets fail the run (NoRowsCollectedError) so schedules and automations do not silently succeed with zero rows.

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Housing categories supported

Code	Meaning
apa	Apartments / housing for rent
swp	Housing swap
off	Office & commercial
prk	Parking & storage
rea	Real estate for sale
roo	Rooms & shares
sub	Sublets & temporary
vac	Vacation rentals
hou	Wanted: apts / housing
hsw	Wanted: all housing
sha	Wanted: room / share
reo	Sale by owner shortcut → rea + owner
reb	Sale by broker shortcut → rea + dealer
all	All housing categories above

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How the Craigslist scraper works

The Actor is HTTP-first (got-scraping + Cheerio):

1. Primary search via Craigslist SAPI /web/v8/postings/search/full
2. Optional public detail HTML enrichment (JSON-LD, attributes, map, images)
3. Optional Apify Proxy when you enable it in input
4. Never calls Craigslist /reply contact endpoints

SAPI /full returns at most 360 rows per request and does not expose a reliable offset. When maxItems > 360, the Actor automatically shards across alternate sorts (dateoldest, price asc/desc) and category-aware price buckets (rent vs sale vs commercial) to collect more unique postings. For category=all, unused per-category quota is refilled on a second pass.

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Pricing

Pay per event:

Event	Price
Actor start (apify-actor-start)	$0.005 per run
Result (apify-default-dataset-item)	$2.00 / 1,000 listings

Users also pay Apify platform usage costs for the run (compute and any Apify Proxy usage you enable).

Examples:

• 50 enriched apartment listings ≈ $0.005 + (50 × $0.002) = $0.105 in Actor events (plus platform usage)
• 1,000 listings ≈ $0.005 + $2.00 = $2.005 in Actor events (plus platform usage)

Free Apify plan: up to 10 runs of this Actor and 1,000 listings per run. Upgrade to a paid Apify plan for unlimited runs (schema max still applies). Limits set by the Actor developer.

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Tips for better Craigslist housing data

• Start with a real area slug from the Craigslist site URL (/search/area/{slug}).
• Keep scrapeDetails=true when you need bathrooms, body text, map address, or full image lists.
• Raise maxItems above 360 only when you need deeper coverage; sharding fetches more pages.
• Enable residential proxy if your network path is blocked from sapi.craigslist.org.
• Prefer smaller scheduled runs (for example posted-today + modest maxItems) over giant one-off dumps.

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FAQ

Why am I limited to 10 runs / 1,000 listings on the free plan?

Those limits are set by this Actor's developer for free Apify plan users (not an Apify platform bug). Upgrade to a paid Apify plan for unlimited runs of this Actor. Event pricing (PPE) is separate from these free-tier caps.

Can I scrape Craigslist apartments without an API key?

Yes. This Actor uses public Craigslist search and listing pages. You do not need a Craigslist API key or account login.

Does this scrape Craigslist contact / reply info?

No. The Actor does not call Craigslist /reply endpoints. It only reads public search and detail content.

Why do I sometimes get fewer than maxItems?

Craigslist may simply have fewer matching postings for your area, category, and filters. The Actor fails only when it collects zero rows.

How do I scrape more than 360 Craigslist results?

Set maxItems above 360. The Actor shards across alternate sorts and price buckets because SAPI /full has no true offset pagination.

Can I scrape all Craigslist housing categories at once?

Yes. Set category to all. The Actor splits the maxItems budget fairly across categories.

Is there a Live-view / Standby API?

Yes, but it is metadata only. Standby exposes discovery endpoints (/, /health, /input-example, /openapi.json) and does not scrape Craigslist or return listings. Full scraping still runs as a normal Apify Actor batch run so listings land in the default dataset.

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Integrations

• Apify API / SDK — start runs and fetch the dataset programmatically
• Schedules — daily or hourly housing monitors
• Make, n8n, Zapier — push new listings into Sheets, Slack, or CRM
• MCP / AI agents — use the Actor as a Craigslist housing data tool

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Limitations

• Public listings only; no private or authenticated Craigslist data
• Contact/reply endpoints are intentionally out of scope
• Result volume depends on live Craigslist inventory and filters
• Very large maxItems values take longer because of sharding and politeness delays

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Related searches

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