It'll be interesting to see if crowd-sourcing can work for PadLister here. CL's incumbency gives them a strong monopoly on the small independent landlords and subletting.

Power of the social media vs. power of the network effect. Rooting for PadMapper on this one.

I'm definitely interested too :-) Thanks Wil for putting this up here, I hopped on a flight shortly after posting this on the blog. If anyone has any ideas of how to spread the word enough, I'd love to hear them here or via email at eric at padmapper. The hard part is getting the small landlords with a couple rooms or some building to hear about and use it.

There's probably a number of ways to do it. Not all listings are created equal. If people get the impression there are better/cheaper/more unique listings on padlister, then might be willing to go there.

the real problem is knowing to go there in the first place though. most people have no idea that it exists.

Well, we do. I'm certainly going to spread the news. I like the spunk!

What it'll take is a hyperlocal focus. Taking on CL head-on for national listings is daunting and inefficient. It would be much better if PL would go after a specific, narrowly-defined area, for example Brooklyn. Be the very best and definitive source on Brooklyn apartment. Contact landlords listing on Craigslist and offer them the chance to cross-list for free. Promise them higher quality leads. Add a showing/scheduling tool so prospective tenants can make viewing appointments online. Have a message center where clients can ask questions (which are then just emailed directly to the landlord.) Make it were the landlord doesn't have to do anything at all. You do the postings yourself. Do it for every quality Brooklyn apartment, continue doing it, day in, day out. Once you have a sizable number of listings flyer the hell out of Brooklyn and Union Square (or your local equivalent.) Post flyers for 3 hours every day in every coffeeshop, bar, bike shop, barber, on every light pole you can. If you don't have time, hire some kids to do it for you.

Once you are THE place for Brooklyn, add some listings for the East Village. Rinse and repeat.

Research how ZocDoc did what they did. Just going all scattershot isn't going to do anything.

What PL needs is a high listing density for a particular area rather than just a few apartments here and there. No one wants to visit an empty nightclub, so rather than opening a stadium-sized place, open a small basement place and make it the hottest place around, using that success to grow.

Also, if you can show great metrics in a Brooklyn-type place, you'll have some solid investor interest that can drive even more growth.

Whatever the city -- hypertargeting is the edge that could push you past craigslist. After all, that's exactly how craigslist got started in the first place. Use their strategy to beat them. You start getting some traction in a particular area, then you can start charging for preferred listings or some other value-added thing.

I'm far from an expert, but if you want to beat CL, that's how you do it.

Will PadLister provide a free API for everyone to use?

Why should they? They never complained about Craigslists' right to theirs. Now they can leverage their popularity into a disruptive counter-service.

Maybe not. But I bet it also won't go out of its way to blacklist anyone it catches scraping.

I haven't gotten around to making one, but I might offer XML feeds - I already do that to export to some other big sites and get more contacts for the people that list.

I added a listing.

However I noticed it strongly encouraged the user to link to her/his Facebook to "increase trust" for potential tenants.

I don't know if you've ever been a landlord before, but I absolutely do NOT want my tenants to look at my Facebook or know where I live. That's why I have my tenants mail their rent to a PO box.

Someone should release a tool to scrape craigslist and post to padlister. Wouldn't craigslist have to counter-scrape and file a DMCA takedown notice for each listing?

I don't think Craigslist can legally issue a DMCA takedown for posts since they don't own the copyright to them. Padmapper stopped scraping Craigslist because it's against Craigslist's terms of service and Craigslist asked them to stop. A third party scraper as you've described would be harder to stop.

I think you could probably make a chrome web app/plugin that does the scraping locally to get the data, then feeds it back in to padmapper.

Sure. Let's build tools to steal other people's data and profit from it.

I guess I'm more sympathetic in this case because of the nature of the data: they're classified listings. The dynamic there is that landlords actually want lots of people to see their ad, and apartment hunters want to see as many good options as possible. So in this case, CL is a portal for that, but has set its policy to be such that it prevents the access both the landlords and the apt hunters want.

Sure, CL is in its right as a for-profit company to not share info. But it's not in the best interest of the people who post (i.e. the generators of that data). It's frustrating that CL gets to tout itself as some uniquely altruistic for-profit company that's not all about maximizing profit and more focused on the good of its users, then refuses to give the posters more exposure for the sake of keeping their monopoly. Then they automatically assume that every other competitor out there is some greedy capitalist trying to profit off the community, which it doesn't seem like PadMapper has done. It's got a lot of users, but not much of a profit model, and it's been this way for years.

This is the logical move for padmapper. I wonder if the press they've been getting will be enough to seed their user base to make it self-sustaining.

It would be ironic if Craigslist just helped create a viable competitor, though this is unlikely.

If so, then it would justify Craigslist having a blanket "no using our data, ever" position, and shutting down competitors like padmapper much earlier.

It won't make a dent. Getting landlords off of Craigslist is about as easy as gettin South Korea off Internet Explorer.

From this tweet it sounds like Craigslist might be launching their own improved housing search...

http://twitter.com/craignewmark/status/217329959373504514

By your reckoning, that tweet also suggests we are about to go war with Bolivia.

Also, I might have a different person as the contact person for each listing/property; the way it's set up now, it doesn't let you set name on a per-listing basis, it automatically pulls it from the linked profile.

Each person should have their own account, or if you set up a feed, you can set different contact emails for each listing. Does that not match with how you'd see yourself working with it?

It's interesting how some in the hacker news community make such a big deal about this issue but doesn't put as much effort into helping all startups trying to build something useful. It seems like this issue has degraded into something beyond Craigslist and their decisions and into a charity solicitation for Padmapper. I wish my company got this kind of free marketing support. I guess I ought to steal some data and then complain when the owner pulls the plug. I am happy to read about the issue, but I am not happy that a company attempts to use HN as a tool for their own benefit.

Wow, nice string of comments in here. Did I offend you somehow? The outrage isn't about "charity", it's about the millions of people that depend on this service to find housing more easily on Craigslist. If you've ever used PadMapper, you'd know that it wasn't co opting craigslist data, it was just summarizing and linking to it.

Don't worry about it, Eric. I think a lot of HNers have found PadMapper useful, support what you're doing and want it to be successful — hence, this making the front page.

I care about PadMapper the company just to the extent that it is a reasonable startup and seems like decent people, but the real reason I care is selfish -- it's the least bad way to do preliminary searches for apartments, and to find "pop up listings", that I've found to date.

(The second stage strategy which worked pretty well in SF at least was to find decent but unacceptable for some reason listings using padmapper, than contact the property management companies or listings services directly and ask them if they had more listings which were different. That's how I found my SF place back in 2009, starting from a craigslist ad for a place which was out of my budget.