MyNewPlace and Craigslist

June 25th, 2009 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

MyNewPlace has developed a tool to make it easy for our clients to post ads for their apartments, or even specific unit, to Craigslist. Currently, posting to Craigslist can be a cumbersome process and is vulnerable to human error. The goal of our Craigslist tool is to make it as easy as possible for apartment management companies to post consistent and accurate information to Craigslist.

The Craigslist tool is a very simple concept: all it does is automatically pull the information on any property or unit listed on our site into an HTML or text only Craigslist ad. This will help property managers and leasing specialists by substantially decreasing the time it takes to create a Craigslist ad as well as guaranteeing that your ad contains complete and up to date information consistent with all online listings.

Now, a few things about Craigslist; our tool creates an ad which can then be copied and pasted into Craigslist. There is no API or feed submission (which keeps out automated spam) so there cannot be a “submit” one button solution.

So, let’s take a closer look at this new tool and how it works. All MyNewPlace clients that do not have monthly lead caps lower than 15 are eligible to use the post to Craigslist tool, however, apartments must contact MyNewPlace so that we may enable the feature. Sign in the MyNewPlace Manager Center to enable this feature now.

Post to Craigslist from the Manager Center

To post an ad to Craigslist, sign into the MyNewPlace manager center, and select “Post to Craigslist” under the Advertising section of the Navigation bar. Then, select a property ad or unit ad with a certain floorplan (below is a screenshot of the “Post to Craigslist” page with an inset of an HTML property ad.

2 Choices – Property or Unit and HTML or Text

By selecting “Generate Post,” the below screen will appear, which provides either code for an HTML post or a simple text ad to post in Craigslist. The entire contents of the HTML box need to be copied and then pasted into Craigslist.

On the same page that generates the ad, we provide an iframe of Craigslist.com, to make everything run as smoothly as possible. Once here, select your city, hit “post to classifieds” select “housing offered” and then apts/housing for rent, select the neighborhood (optional) and then paste in either the HTML code or text into the “property description” section of the Craigslist ad editor.

To complete the ad, supply an email address, (anonymized, displayed or hidden) an ad title and hit continue. This will generate a preview, bring up a Terms and Conditions agreement and display a reminder that an ad will only be displayed at Craigslist after the email addressee clicks on a confirmation email.

Craigslist, a nationwide classified website, organized by city, has just about 40 million unique visitors in the United States every month; a good portion of those visitors are looking for their next apartment or rental home.

Owners who have apartments or homes for rent use Craigslist because it is an easy way for them to reach out to many prospects in their area. Craigslist has established a certain amount of legitimacy due to its overwhelming popularity.

We have designed this tool to help our apartments reach those prospective tenants by taking advantage of Craigslist. We are also aware that apartment management staffs are very busy, so we streamlined the process to help leasing specialists be as efficient as possible while filling their vacancies.

Let us know what you think or if you have any questions at all!