Craig’s List: A Tutorial

Craig’s List is the most-used apartment hunting website in the Boston area. Essentially a giant community bulletin board for housing, furniture, and a variety of services, Craig’s List can offer an awful lot of options for apartments and rooms to share. However, if you’ve never used Craig’s List before, or if you’ve used it and it hasn’t proven to be that useful for you, below is a tutorial on how to find more listings for apartments you want using this system. Many of the steps involve finding ways to cut out chunks of listings from your searches and queries. With a number of listings sometimes topping 70,000 during the summer, any technique you can use to focus your search will save you time and effort.

At the bottom of the page are a number of items to keep in mind as you use Craig’s List, as well. Just because it’s the most popular system in the Boston area doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be the right tool for you. Craig’s List is harder to use if you can’t come to Boston to view apartments personally.

Steps in the Process

  1. Select the housing section of the site When using Craig’s List as a housing resource, the first step is to select the apartments/housing section of the site. This will connect you to the resources for full-term or standard term leases (12 months). If you are looking for shorter term leases, you’ll want to look under the sublets/temporary category. If you are looking to move in with somebody, and you don’t care if they are a student or not, use the rooms/shared option. Screen shot of Craig’s List’s main page

    2. Apartment categories

  2. Select the category of apartments you want to search Once you’ve selected the apts/housing tab, you’ll be brought to a new screen that will ask you what group of listings you’d like to search. The default option is to include all the listings in the system, but this usually isn’t the most productive way to search. Because Craig’s List reaches so many people across the greater Boston area, the housing section in particular is a prime location for realtors and brokers to advertise their apartment listings. If you are interested in working with a real estate professional, that’s a viable option for finding housing, but the OHR strongly recommends that you try to find housing without using a broker or agent first. As you’ll see in our Working with Realtors section, in Massachusetts, real estate professionals are legally allowed to charge you a commission, or finder’s fee, of up to one month’s rent as payment for helping you find an apartment. A good realtor can help you find great listings that you otherwise would never know about. A bad realtor won’t show you anything that you couldn’t find on your own. If you are using Craig’s List, there’s a good chance that whatever a realtor has posted on the site is also posted by the owner directly. If you can find good apartments without having to pay a hefty commission, then do it.If you select the third option on the page, the ‘by owner-apartments only’ option, you will restrict the listings that you are searching to only those posts that were put up by the owners of the properties themselves. These listings generally don’t have any fees associated with them, since most owners are not also real estate agents. This is also a good way to cut out a lot of duplicate postings.
  3. Select the geographical area you want to searchApartment categoriesOnce you’ve chosen what category of posts to search, you will also want to choose the location in which to focus your efforts. Again, Craig’s List’s default position is to include listings from all across the greater Boston area. While that’s great – it can give you a lot of different options – most students and staff here at the BUMC are not looking to find an apartment out in the suburb of Lexington, or in the towns on the North or South Shore. It simply takes too long to get from those locations to campus for them to be convenient. If you are really interested in living in Boston proper, or in the immediate towns of Brookline or Cambridge, select the geographical tab to restrict the posts to only those that are within that area. This way, you won’t have to flip through pages of listings that aren’t useful for you as you try to find an apartment in your ideal location.
  4. Use the search tools to find apartments that work for youApartment categoriesNow that you have cut out the apartments listed by brokers, and the apartments outside the area you want to look, the next step is to use the tools that Craig’s List provides to find the apartments that will work for you. There are four main search tools that help to narrow down the listings you’ll see:
    • The “search for:” bar is a good way to limit the listings to specific neighborhoods within Boston, or areas within neighborhoods. For example, if you know that you are only interested in living in the South End neighborhood of Boston, this is a good place to put in that restriction. The search bar isn’t perfect, though, and so you will still see some results that don’t seem to fit your criteria. In the example above, some listings may sneak into your results if the listing text has the words “south” and “end” somewhere in it. Likewise, some apartments that are in the South End, but aren’t labeled that way by the person who listed them may not show up (if a poster lists his or her apartment as a Union Park studio, or a Harrison Avenue 2 bedroom, it may not appear when you search for “South End.”). Generally, though, the search bar is a good way to further narrow your geographic interests.
    • The rent min/max buttons are probably the single best way to limit what apartments you see. This is a good thing: if you know that you cannot pay more than a certain dollar amount for your rent, then you don’t want to search through mountains of listings you can’t afford. Remember that this field only covers the cost of rent, not the cost for utilities, and that if you are looking for a multi-bedroom apartment, to add up each roommate’s potential rent limit, otherwise you won’t find many apartments.
    • The apartment size drop-down menu lets you select how many bedrooms you are looking for. If you don’t have any particular space requirements, or if you are looking for a studio apartment, leave the menu on 0+ BR. The system will always return the listings that have as many or more bedrooms than you required, but it won’t return any listings that don’t have at least as many bedrooms as you needed. This usually works pretty well, although you will sometimes see situations where you selected 2 or 3 bedrooms, and get a lot of 2 or 3 bedroom split apartments instead of true, full bedrooms. This will also depend on the financial range you are investigating: splits are usually cheaper than full-size apartments.
    • Pet needs check-boxes let you specify if you intend to live with your dog or cat. A lot of listings on Craig’s List do not specify whether the landlord allows pets or not, so use these check-boxes carefully – they will drastically limit the number of apartments you find, since they only return posts that explicitly allow pets. However, if you do find an apartment that allows pets, you won’t have to worry about having a conversation about your dog or cat with the landlord later.

    The image and title search boxes can also help you reduce the number of listings you find, although cutting out all listings without pictures may not be the best idea.

  5. Search for apartments Apartment categoriesOnce you’ve put in all your criteria, search the system and see what you get back. Craig’s List will display the number of apartments that have met your requirements, and tell you how many listings you have to evaluate. If you were relatively specific in your criteria (a maximum rent, a neighborhood, an apartment size restriction), you’ll probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 listings. If you are looking for an apartment on your own, with no roommates, remember that Boston is really expensive, and that the South End neighborhood is one of the pricier areas of an already pricey town. If you try to find a one bedroom apartment here for $900, there’s very little chance you will find anything. Once you’ve got the list of posts in front of you, you can click on any of them to bring up more details. Craig’s List automatically displays the most recent posts first. It’s usually best to start with the recent posts, because listings on the system expire quickly (usually in a week or two). People who are really interested in renting apartments, or selling cars or furniture, will probably post the listings every few days (or sometimes every day). Starting at the bottom of the page can mean looking through a lot of duplicate posts as you move up. Another thing to keep in mind as you look through your results is that some of the posts will not have met your criteria, but managed to slip into the search anyway. As you can see from the screenshot, the first apartment in our results queue doesn’t indicate that it’s in the South End – it just says “Boston” in the parentheses. When the OHR checked out the listing, it was, in fact, located in East Boston, which is too far away for our example search here. You can generally find the apartments that do fit your criteria by paying a little bit of attention to what’s written in the parentheses after the title of the post. If it matches your neighborhood requirements, you are all set. Don’t waste your time with listings that aren’t going to give you what you need.
  6. Review the best listings listingAs you scan over your results, certain listings will catch your eye for either being in your price range, offering an interesting deal, or both. Click on the highlighted blue header for a post, and it will load a page like the one above. Almost all Craig’s List’s posts include a couple of important pieces of information: contact numbers or emails, an apartment description, and a location. Craig’s List doesn’t limit posters with what they can provide for phone numbers or email addresses on their listings, but many people who post on Craig’s List like to remain anonymous until they get a message from a genuinely interested person. Craig’s List does provide an anonymous email address to help facilitate communication without exposing the poster’s identity. This means that most of the time, when you contact someone about a post you saw on Craig’s List, you won’t know his or her name or location. Being polite and a little more formal than you normally would be is a good way to impress potential landlords who’ve posted on Craig’s List. The most important part of the listing is the description of the apartment itself. These descriptions vary widely from one person to the next: some are written as paragraph descriptions, others are long lists of features or amenities. Most of them, though, will include the most important information and if they don’t, you should ask about it if you get in contact with the poster. You’ll usually find the rent, the term of the lease, what move-in costs are associated with the apartment, what utilities are included with the apartment and a rough idea for the size of the place. Smart posters include pictures, too, but remember that pictures are never a good alternative for actually seeing an apartment personally. Finally, a number of posters will input a general location for their apartment, and Craig’s List will provide you with a quick Google Maps feature to give you an idea of where in the city the apartment is actually located. If you’ve done some background research about the neighborhood you are investigating, this feature will give you a better idea of how close to public transportation and other neighborhood needs the apartment is.
  7. Contact the posters of your favorite listings contact sampleOnce you’ve found a few listings that you like, you should prepare a quick email or phone call to express your interest in the apartment. Because most posters on Craig’s List are anonymous, you’ll want to approach the emails or calls with a certain degree of formality. You don’t have to practice your best debate voice, or your finest academic writing, but you do want to use polite and neutral language where possible. Also, you will want to mention as early in your email or phone call as possible that you are a graduate student at Boston University’s Medical Campus. Most landlords in Boston have two impressions of students, one for undergraduates and another for graduates. Undergraduate students don’t benefit from the best reputation, and in the city, landlords are legally allowed (and sometimes required) not to rent property to them. However, graduate students (especially those in a long term program like medical school, dental school, a PhD) are a completely different matter: most landlords would love to have a graduate student living in his or her building. The feedback the OHR has collected indicates that most landlords like graduates because they think the students are mature, responsible, dedicated workers, and probably won’t actually be home all that often. Your status as a student is a valuable negotiating tool, so make sure the poster of the listing knows about it. The next step in an apartment search process, once you’ve found the listings themselves, is to schedule appointments with property owners and landlords and actually go see what they have to offer in person. For some of our students, coming to Boston before school begins to look for housing isn’t a reasonable task. If it is, though, having the ability to look at an apartment in person is vastly superior to getting pictures, or having another person do it for you. You may find that, if you make significant use of Craig’s List, that a certain percentage of landlords or posters won’t really be able to offer you an apartment, or space in one, if you can’t come to Boston physically. They want to meet you in person, and ensure that you really are interested in the room. If you can’t make it here, they may decide to go with another potential tenant who they have actually met. We’ll discuss some strategies below to help get around this issue, if you are encountering it with regularity.
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