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.