Craigslist Scraper by nexgendata

Scrape Craigslist listings for apartments, jobs, items for sale, services, and gigs in any city. This actor searches Craigslist's classified listings and extracts titles, prices, posting dates, locations, and direct URLs. Built for real estate researchers, job market analysts, and anyone who needs structured data from the largest classified advertising platform in the United States.

Craigslist operates in over 700 cities across 70 countries, handling an estimated 80 million classified ads per month in the US alone. Despite its deliberately minimal interface, Craigslist remains the dominant platform for apartment rentals, local services, used goods, and gig work in most American cities. The platform's lack of a public API and its resistance to data aggregation make programmatic access challenging. This actor solves that problem by extracting listing data from search results pages and delivering it as structured JSON.

How It Works

Specify a city (using Craigslist's city codes like "newyork", "sfbay", "losangeles", "chicago") and a category (apartments, jobs, for_sale, services, gigs, community, or housing). Optionally add a keyword query to filter results. The actor searches the specified Craigslist section and extracts listing data including the title, asking price, posting date, neighborhood location, and a direct link to the full listing. Pagination is handled automatically — the actor will fetch multiple pages of results up to your specified maximum.

Category options cover the major Craigslist sections. Apartments (apa) returns rental listings. Jobs (jjj) covers all employment postings. For sale (sss) includes everything from furniture to electronics to vehicles. Services (bbb) lists local service providers. Gigs (ggg) captures short-term and freelance opportunities. Each listing includes the metadata that Craigslist displays on its search results pages.

Who Uses This

Real estate analysts and property managers monitor Craigslist rental listings to track asking rents across neighborhoods and cities. When a property management company needs to price a new listing, Craigslist data provides the most current snapshot of what comparable units are asking in the same area. Researchers studying housing affordability use Craigslist rental data as a leading indicator of market conditions, since landlords adjust asking rents in real time based on demand.

Economists and labor market researchers analyze Craigslist job postings to study local employment dynamics, wage trends, and industry composition. Unlike aggregated job boards, Craigslist captures small business hiring that often does not appear on LinkedIn or Indeed, providing a more complete picture of local labor markets, especially for service, trade, and gig economy roles.

Used goods resellers and arbitrage businesses monitor for-sale listings to identify underpriced items. Local service businesses track competitor pricing and advertising patterns. Market researchers studying consumer behavior use Craigslist as a data source for understanding local commerce patterns, pricing expectations, and demand signals.

Pricing

This actor costs $3 per 1,000 results. Monitoring apartments in a single city (200 listings) costs $0.60. A weekly scan of job postings across 10 cities runs $3-5 depending on volume. Monthly housing market monitoring across 50 metro areas costs approximately $30-50. Craigslist has no official API and explicitly limits automated access, making proxy-based scraping the only reliable method for collecting this data at scale.

💻 Code Example — Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("nexgendata/craigslist-scraper").call(run_input={
    # Fill in the input shape from the actor's input_schema
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

🌐 Code Example — cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~craigslist-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ /* input schema */ }'

❓ FAQ

Q: How do I get started? Sign up at apify.com, grab your API token from Settings → Integrations, and run the actor via the Apify console, API, Python SDK, or any integration (Zapier, Make.com, n8n).

Q: What's the typical cost per run? See the pricing section below. Most runs finish under $0.10 for typical batches.

Q: Is this actor maintained? Yes. NexGenData maintains 165+ Apify actors and ships updates regularly. Bug reports via the Apify console issues tab get responses within 24 hours.

Q: Can I use the output commercially? Yes — you own the output data. Check the target site's Terms of Service for any usage restrictions on the scraped content itself.

Q: How do I handle rate limits? Apify manages concurrency and retries automatically. For very large batches (10K+ items), run multiple smaller jobs in parallel instead of one mega-job for better reliability.

💰 Pricing

Pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you actually extract.

• Actor Start: $0.0001
• result: $0.0050

🔗 Related NexGenData Actors

• Shopify Spy
• Shopify Store Detector
• SaaS Pricing Tracker

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New to Apify? Sign up with our referral link — you get free platform credits on signup, and you help fund the maintenance of this actor fleet.

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Built and maintained by NexGenData — 165+ actors covering scraping, enrichment, MCP servers, and automation. 🏠 Home: thenextgennexus.com