About a year or so ago, my husband and I use to place our listings on Craigslist and it was the best lead generator ever. We managed an office and every day the phones would ring like crazy. No matter how much our company would spend on newspaper advertising the only calls we got were "Craigslist". Not to mention the numerous email inquiries.
But like everything in life, society started abusing and misusing it. Now, all we get every morning are dozens of solicitations for other websites and scams. WOW, it's really sad how "people" just can't utilize a good thing without ruining it. As the site became more and more popular for Realtors to post, it slowly went down hill.
It's actually dangerous to have a new agent post on Craigslist because they must be trained now on how to spot a virus or scam, and delete without opening. Every morning we'd wake up to 30 or more emails, and you can see that they were all done at the same time but with different names (stolen of coarse to make it look like a legitimate inquiry).
What also hurt the effectiveness of Craigslist was something my old Broker started to do. He found out that it was working so well for us, so he made it mandatory for every secretary in every office to post dozens of ads every morning. Well, if you know how craigslist works, the more posts put on, the lower your post goes on the visible list.
Needless to say, legitamate buyers and sellers must have gotten so disgusted by the scams also, and started going elsewhere to find home ads. it's very dissappointing that another GOOD thing has gone down the drain.
So I would love any suggestions anyone might have for a site (or sites) where we could get the phones to ring again. We've searched high and low, and we use most of the well known RE sites, but none work the way Craigslist did.
Thanks in Advance for any ideas!
Sandra Nixon
EverSand Realty Group
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I'm going to re-blog this because you have some very legitimate concerns. I, however, post rental listings DAILY to our local CL and I FLAG SCAM posts directly to CL using the FEEDBACK option with the ad address....If you watermark your photos AND have a link to a legitimate website, your listing have much more value and the "long tail" which is important!!!