Craigslist New Listing Monitor

Run it on a schedule and get only the listings that are new since the last run for any number of saved Craigslist searches: apartments, rooms, cars, motorcycles, jobs, gigs, for-sale items, any city and category, with keyword and price filters. It remembers every posting it has already reported, so a run that finds nothing new returns nothing, and a run that finds three new posts returns exactly three. New listings can be POSTed to a webhook (Slack, Zapier, Make, your own API).

Built for people who need to be first: apartment hunters and investors, car and equipment resellers, recruiters watching job and gig boards, dealers and flippers watching for-sale categories.

How it works

1. Every run fetches the newest ~360 matches of each saved search (Craigslist's search page is a single page sorted newest first).
2. Postings whose ID is already in the monitor's state store are skipped.
3. The rest are emitted as changeType: "new" (up to maxNewPerSearch per search and maxItems per run) and recorded as seen.
4. Optionally each new posting is opened for the full body, attributes, images, address, coordinates and posted time (includeDetails).
5. A JSON summary with the new listings is POSTed to webhookUrl, if set.

State lives in a named key-value store craigslist-monitor-<hash of monitorId> under your account, so it survives between runs and each monitorId is an independent watchlist. Up to 50,000 posting IDs are kept per monitor; the oldest are dropped beyond that.

Scheduling

Create an Apify Schedule for this actor:

• Hot markets (SF Bay, NYC, LA rentals; popular car models): every 15-30 minutes.
• Most searches: hourly.
• Jobs and gigs: every 2-4 hours.

Each run costs the start fee plus $0.01 per new listing, so a 30-minute schedule that finds nothing costs only the start fee.

First run

• firstRunMode: "emitAll" (default): the first run emits the newest current listings up to the caps and records everything else on the page as seen, so the second run reports only what is new since. This is also what you get when you press Run with no input.
• firstRunMode: "baseline": the first run records every current listing silently and emits nothing. Use it when you only want alerts for postings created after you set the monitor up.

To reset a monitor, delete the STATE record from its key-value store or pick a new monitorId.

Input

{
    "searches": [
        { "city": "sfbay", "category": "apa", "minPrice": 1500, "maxPrice": 3500, "postedToday": true, "label": "SF rentals under 3500" },
        { "city": "austin", "category": "cta", "query": "toyota tacoma", "maxPrice": 25000 },
        { "city": "newyork", "category": "jjj", "query": "registered nurse" },
        { "city": "seattle", "category": "roo", "filters": { "min_bedrooms": 1, "hasPic": 1 } }
    ],
    "maxNewPerSearch": 5,
    "maxItems": 10,
    "includeDetails": false,
    "firstRunMode": "emitAll",
    "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/...",
    "monitorId": "default"
}

Each search object:

Field	Meaning
city	Craigslist area code, the subdomain in the URL: sfbay, newyork, losangeles, chicago, houston, dallas, austin, seattle, portland, denver, phoenix, miami, atlanta, boston, washingtondc, philadelphia, minneapolis, sandiego, toronto, vancouver, london…
category	Category code: apa apartments, hhh all housing, roo rooms and shares, sub sublets, rea real estate for sale, cta cars and trucks, mca motorcycles, boo boats, rva RVs, sss all for sale, fua furniture, ela electronics, bia bikes, tla tools, hva heavy equipment, bfa business for sale, jjj all jobs, sof software jobs, ggg gigs, bbb services, ccc community, pet pets
query	Optional keyword search inside the category
minPrice, maxPrice	Optional price bounds
postedToday	true = only postings from today
label	Optional name shown in searchLabel (defaults to city/category "query")
filters	Optional extra Craigslist URL parameters, e.g. {"min_bedrooms": 2, "hasPic": 1, "auto_transmission": 2, "condition": 40}. Copy them from the URL after filtering on craigslist.org.

Other inputs: maxNewPerSearch (default 5), maxItems (default 10), includeDetails (default false), firstRunMode, webhookUrl, monitorId, proxyConfiguration (residential US by default).

Output

One record per new listing:

{
    "postingId": "4bqxN1argTtJ5fYd1Vn5JM",
    "title": "Must-See 1 BR Retreat W/ Pool & Balconies! Pet Friendly Living",
    "price": 2445,
    "priceText": "$2,445",
    "location": "fremont / union city / newark",
    "locality": "Fremont",
    "region": "CA",
    "address": "4140 Irvington Ave",
    "latitude": 37.530963,
    "longitude": -121.960526,
    "postedAt": "2026-09-28T11:45:03-0700",
    "url": "https://www.craigslist.org/view/d/fremont-must-see-br-retreat-pool/4bqxN1argTtJ5fYd1Vn5JM",
    "imageUrl": "https://images.craigslist.org/00202_5SgH78wRbBi_08g0co_600x450.jpg",
    "images": ["..."],
    "category": "apa",
    "city": "sfbay",
    "attributes": { "bedrooms": 1, "bathrooms": 1, "sqft": 730, "rent period": "monthly", "features": ["cats are OK - purrr", "apartment", "dogs are OK - wooof", "laundry on site"] },
    "body": "Free parking! Welcome to Oak Pointe ...",
    "searchLabel": "SF rentals under 3500",
    "changeType": "new",
    "firstSeenAt": "2026-09-28T19:20:11.000Z",
    "monitorId": "default"
}

Without includeDetails, address, postedAt and body are null and attributes holds only what the search page exposes (bedrooms and bathrooms for housing). Coordinates, locality and images come from the search page for most categories.

Webhook payload

{
    "monitorId": "default",
    "runAt": "2026-09-28T19:20:11.000Z",
    "newCount": 3,
    "baselined": 0,
    "seenTotal": 812,
    "firstRun": false,
    "baseline": false,
    "searches": [{ "label": "SF rentals under 3500", "url": "...", "listingsOnPage": 359, "newCount": 3 }],
    "listings": [ ...up to 50 records as above... ]
}

The same summary (without listings) is stored as SUMMARY in the run's default key-value store.

Notes

• Craigslist's search page is limited to its ~360 newest matches. A search that gets more than that between two runs will miss the overflow, so schedule busy searches more often or split them (by price band, neighborhood or keyword).
• Reposted listings get a new posting ID on Craigslist and are reported as new.
• Runs use Apify residential proxies by default; Craigslist blocks most shared datacenter ranges after a few requests.