Has anyone been using Craigslist to advertise their properties for sale? If so, are you getting a good response?

I have been trying over the past few months but don't get much of a response on the stuff for sale...but get a huge response for rentals.

If you are getting a resonse on sales, what kind of wording are you using?

Thanks for your help,

JIll

I use CraigsList as a means of getting people to my website.

That is a good idea. Do you have a current post up now that I could look at? Could you copy and paste the post or message it to me? Thanks!

Did not work well for me on sales, but I use it for same perpose like Perky! For rentals works great for me, I got many leads from there. Hey Perky, how are you doing? I hope business is going well in this hard time.

I use it to get traffic like the others have replied. Getting real serious qualified buyers off Craigslist is not happening often.

I actually sold a listing that I had by using Craigs list. I was lucky that my buyer was a cash buyer looking for a retirement property. I must admit, I think it was pure luck.

Have any of you attempted to go after the renters and target people who don't realize they may already qualify for a home? I'm experiencing a high number of FTHB that don't realize they can get qualified b/c of what they listen to on the news.

Any thoughts?

Developed a lot of leads but nothing has panned out as of yet. It is a good resource and it does lead people to our website as well.

I try to advertise locally on CL. Have received one call in five months...

Craigslist used to be a good source for buyers before real estate agents flooded the site with their listings, like they can't be found on realtor.com.

It has always depended on the particular property for me. Some properties I advertise there get some good response while others none at all. Overall I have had pretty good luck on rental properties.

I think its a great idea. I haven't quite had time to do anything with it yet but I believe you're right....there's a whole group of people out there without a clue that should be buying right now.

I had some luck selling my condo near the university on Craig's List. I made the wording a little more direct than the wording in MLS...brought up the fact that you could get a roommate to pay enough rent to cover the mortgage.

I think it all depends on the target market for the property. Multi $M homes probably wouldn't do well at all on there.

I have been posting my rental ads on craigslist in hopes of getting my properties rented and also a buyer prospect. This has kept me busy except I find that most prospects on craigslist are very non committed to working with an agent. They seem to disappear after a few showings and do not return phone calls. Maybe this is just my experience,but I do receive many calls. I seem to go above and beyond but have not reaped any rewards. I have spent a lot of time and money in gas showing properties and they seem to find their own. I figured it would be a little money the since market is down right now. I just cant believe how inconsiderate people are of your time and resources. Not even a return phone call after going to vm several times. Oh well, its all in the life an RE agent;)

I would always hang up and not leave a message. Then they would call back alot of times out of curiousity. Then you ferret out if they are just busy or wasting your time.

You don't want to spend days wasting time leaving voice mails.

These are semi-warm leads you may have met once NOT clients that are hot prospects that will call you back.

Done well with rentals, but not sales

It works very well for rentals, but not so much for sales. However, everything is local. Some areas the success rate is probably higher with sales. We have had a problem with too many over-postings on Craigs. This makes it tough for buyers to wade through all the "junk."

Actually on Craigslist you can expound upon the property like you can not on realtor.com unless you pay extra for enhanced listings. You can post multiple pictures, include a virtual tour, and add a better description. Our MLS (which feeds realtor.com) has a very limited number of characters that you can use to describe the property.

It's nice now that the listings are separated "by broker" and "by owner."

I get a LOT of hits and have had a couple of calls from Craigslist.

I use craigslist for all my listings. The down side is having to update every week to keep them near the top. I have had several points of contact from craigslist, nothing that turned into sales.

To get maximum results from craigslist you have to consistently post and in my opinion use it for lead generation rather than simply to sell listings. I follow a system I have created and in the last 3+ years have generated between 6000-7000 leads. I post twice daily on weekdays and once on weekends and each time I post between 1 and 5 ads depending on what I am trying to sell or what list I am trying to build.

I AM GETTING OVER 15 SOLID LEADS A DAY, TAKES 100 PROPERTIES TO BE POSTED EVERYDAY. NOT MUCH WORK WHEN YOU USE A MARKETING SERVICE TO POST YOUR PROPERTIES!

;) YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH POTENTIAL CRAIGSLIST HAS!

I get good responses from CL. Of course not every lead is good but I would catch one here and there. Actually I just one of my CL leads into escrow.

I used to post on CL (months ago) but the only thing it usually lead to was email-phising and other forms of spam. As Realtors and agents, its important for us to be easily contacted, but I learned it the hard way.

I will agree to all who've posted it does wonders to redirect to your personal website!

I get a huge response from renters when I put my rental ads. up. Almost to the point that I have to turn off my phone at certain times during the evening.

Do you now have to pay to put these ads on Craigslist?

Craigslist gains you some notoriety in your area but it isn't a strong tool to pull in a customer base. Like you have said rentals are great to advertise through Craigslist because of the traffic you will receive and the amount of renters in the market. To advertise for sale of homes perhaps you could create a website or work out a marketing campaign with a local business etc. Good Luck!


Larissa Rubijevsky

http://www.pvview4u.com

Agree with the flooding of it, seemed to get more of the "is it for rent" questions then solid sales leads. :(

For rentals CL works like a charm for me. For sales it has not worked as well.

I do not like the leads from CL. We would get tons of them with a super low conversion rate so I stopped marketing CL. I have much better results with great longtail key words that I optimize my web site for.

I use craigslist to get new leads. It works Monday through Friday. On Satuday and Sunday I get no leads. On average I get 5 leads per 4 pva. So craigslist lis a good source for leads. The only problem is dealing with getting pvas.

I've used postlets on craigslist before. Never sold any properties there. Gotten my own rented out there though :)

I sold my old van on craiglist. got nothing but spam for the houses listed though.

This is the only thing that I have had much luck with. Decent with driving traffic to your site, but not sure exactly how great it is for advertising a single home.

I sell a lot of properties on Craigslist! Unfortunately, their way of posting is a bit archaic. I dress up my posts with postlets or vflyer.

Also, make your posts about your prospects! Give them what they want-PHOTOS, and INFO!

I also create a lot of leads on Craigslist. I am happy to explain to anybody in a pm.
_________________________
Joe Hildebrand, Realtor
RE/MAX UNLIMITED
http://www.aroundhighlandsranch.com
http://www.denvershortsaleblog.com

There are tons of people fishing for contact info on CL as well. I recently wanted to buy a used Bowflex. CL had 75 listings for them in my area. I contacted a bunch and not only did I not get a Bowflex, but I am getting spammed to death from them.

You need a captivating Title.. to well, captivate interest in what you have for sale. Just remember it doesn't matter how amazing your ad is, or your property.. if no one clicks on your ad, they'll never see it. So really work on the title.

I found a cool FREE service you can use to track the effectiveness of your ads. It called CraigsListAdTracker.Com. play around with unique titles and see what gets clicked on and what doesn't.

I haven't had much luck selling homes with it, but I have gotten a few rentals from it. I post there mostly on the off chance that I'll get a lead, but primarily use it to backlink to my personal website. It seems to be working out really well. The keywords you use are very important.

I had a real person respond to me about the property, finally...but they wanted to know if the owner would rent it.

Jeez. If the owner wanted to RENT it don't you think that it would be under FOR RENT not FOR SALE?

Sigh...........

These hit counters are against craigslist's terms of use. I am having a big problem with them right now, because they are ghosting my ads. That means I post the ads, and I get the confirmation email, but the ad never shows up on cl. The reason they tell me is because I use links in the ads to my website, and because I run generic ads like "foreclosures for sale", instead of a specific property with an address.

It's their site and their rules, but it's very frustrating when I see my competition doing it and getting away with it. On the other hand, I can only attribute two deals to my craigslist ads this year, for total commissions of about $25,000. Still, I would like to continue the ads without the harassment.

I am a property manager and i use craigs list alot for rentals with a good response. i never used it for sales.

Postlets on CL makes it really easy to repost listings to keep it showing up towards the top. Like perky said, it is really easy to get the virtual tour, pics and info on the house up there. Plus, I use it to backlink to my website. All in all, worth the time spent posting.

I use CL all the time but it does bring out the reality challenged LOL

I am very happy with the results I get from Craigslist. It may only be a few leads a year, but since it's free I'm not complaining.

I will assume that posting a first timer property in the rental section of Craigs List might be a violation of their terms??

I LOVE/hate CraigsList! Hah!

I love it in that YES, I get good results.. just be careful of the scammers.. But hate how hard it is to keep ads up.

I use craiglist for both listings and self promotion. create adds to drive traffic to my site and encourage them to sign up to your listingbook account. This time of year is slow but still getting 150 avg hits a day. Fri,Sat,Sun,& Mon appear to be the busiest days.

150 hits a day that is amazing! Care to link to one of your ads? I would be interested to see what exactly you are doing.

Craigslist has only brought me spammers here, but this is more of a kijiji town. Got a couple of leads off kijiji, but not quality leads. So, it doesn't seem like it's worth the effort, when there are better ways to promote online, (Point2, blogs, etc). That said, Joe Public seems to believe in Craiglist/Kijiji, since it works for selling other things, so it might be something to do if it's important to the seller, as far as promoting a listing goes.

Like many others, I've used craigslist and have gotten good traffic to my site; however, most of those traffic are not serious buyers. I designed my own template to use for my ads but then I found out that use.com offers free templates. I have no use for them but maybe it's helpful for you.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing! I get between 100-300 hits a week, sometimes I'll have a really busy week with nearly 400 hits, but never 150 a day! I'd like to see what you're doing as well!

ha ha ha!!! One of our office listings was incorrectly listed in the MLS as 29,000 instead of 290,000. The flood of calls we got was ridiculous. It's like, DUH PEOPLE. It's a 4 year old colonial house on 5 acres! How could it EVER be for sale for less than the cost of the septic system and well, let alone the land and the house!?? Esp when everything else like it is....almost 300,000.

*facepalm.*

LOL

LOL I did the same thing last week... posted a house for 18k instead of 180k on CL... luckily I noticed before I published it. Too funny!

Back before the internet, I ran an ad for a Sunday with 2 properties and switched the prices by mistake. I started to get calls on Saturday evening and had one woman screaming at me on the phone that I HAD to sell her the low price house at that price because it was in the paper. In finally got her to put her husband on the phone, explained the problem (which he understood) and gave him my sympathy. Then I put a message on my phone and turned off the ringer for the next 2 days.

Too many people on craigslist aren't serious. Mostly no shows or just curiosity seekers.

This is about the quality of leads I have gotten off of Craiglist:

I am fighting this as well. I am not a realtor (not for a few years now anyway) but have built sites for my mom the realtor and have done a lot of online marketing.

My mom has an unbranded website hosted by one of the big Real Estate Marketing companies and now wants some unbranded Craigslist ads but I am finding that it is not that easy.

Should the ad look terrible like the Craigslist site? What kind of image do you want to anonymously portray? What kind of ad will get good leads instead of tire kickers? Lots to think about. And I am not sure if there are that many good leads to be had there instead of paying a few bucks for adwords or building a real Facebook presence instead.

To many things to do and just not enough hours in the day

The unbranded website breaks the law in most states because we agents have to make sure the public knows who they are dealing with upfront.

Your mom needs to check into this before she gets caught.

Still haven't gotten a real lead from CL but I know people are looking. The home website that I post the generated ad through keeps track of referring websites and I always have over 100 views straight from CL.

I was into Craigslist for awhile but I got a little busy and have forgotten it. I used postlets.com b/c it's fairly easy to use and you can do alot with it. I also use my website as I can post from there also and it gives me the option of links back to my website. If people have been to any of my postings on Craigslist, I have no idea. I'm not highly techie in these regards. I still get calls from properties that are months old (that irks me!) and I have never received spam from there but I use the coded email that Craiglist gives. If they look legit, I'll call or email-respond them. I think when you list above a certain price level, the higher-income people probably don't go to Craigslist to find a home. Any thoughts on that out there? I certainly wouldn't be going there except to find an FSBO b/c he'll surely give me a better deal b/c he probably has his home priced too low since he probably doesn't know what it's worth and he doesn't have to pay any commissions - right?

I LOVE the beginning of the Snappin Turtle video! Why are there more duds out there than winners for purchasing homes?

I recently bought a home and used craiglist a little bit, but found too much fraud and scams. I finally gave up all together with craigslist

We consistenly use Craigslist to advertise our listings, and do so using vFlyer. Postlets is another good solution to make your listings look professional.

While easy to make your ads look great on Craigslist, we have had a terrible response over the past three years. We've gotten only a handful of inquiries over close to 100 listings, and most of them are duds.

I have outstanding results for rentals on Craigslist, but terrible results for home sales. YMMV.

Yeah, I like to use Postlets to generate ads as well because they feature 6 pics on the ad and you can still upload 4 more pics. However it doesn't track usage and my clients like to get those stats in the weekly updates I send.

I have been using Kijiji - which is like craigslist - to prospect homes. I have found the trick is to give out as LITTLE info as possible. Get their interest up and make them call or email you.

Give them a short description, 1 pic, your name and thats it! You would be surprised how well it can work.

Craigslist is a really good tool to use. Especially if you are not getting much traffic to your site because you just started doing SEO and it hasn’t kicked in yet. The leads are a little weaker but they are still leads.

Just wanted to update... lately I have been getting a lot of messages from CL actually. People are asking questions... nothing closing yet, but leads.

The best way to use craigslist is to direct that traffic to yourt website. Buyers want information on all the homes not just your listings.

I haven't had any leads from listing on CL. The best responses I've ever gotten from CL is when I do a yard sale or am trying to sell a craftsman 10-inch radial saw - lots of calls but no one comes by - we're donating it to charity now for the write-off.

Trulia has brought me a few leads - but no BUYERS with those leads yet!

Buncha' deadbeats out there any more. If it's under $50k - EVERYBODY'S INTERESTED!.....til you tell 'em WHY it's under $50k - duh!

I guess 'agent4lee' isn't going to share the love, er, I mean link.

You will get a higher contact rate if you mix up your headlines and create interesting ones. Always give them a reason to contact you for information, and always post in the morning as well as just before lunch. These seem like when most people view my ads. Lastly, it's free so why wouldn't you use it!

I do great on Craigslist with respect to rentals but from what I understand you aren't going to do as well with a sale. Why that is, I don't know -- maybe it just isn't "there" yet. Seems to me that they recently made an AWESOME interface from Zillow that I really like (let's you post the listing from Zillow on Craigslist) -- but I don't know how it is doing.

Hope that helps,
Pete

Yes, it refers lots of traffic. [url=http://www.ontrackasset.com/rental_management.html]Property Management Marina Del Rey[/url] Property Management Marina Del Rey

Yeah now that Zillow does all the work creating the listing we use it but not sure what if any traffic we get from it...