Craigslist Lays the Smack Down on Real Estate Listings!

Nov 20th Update: Better yet – no TourVista account required! Visit tourvista.com/craigslist

Nov 14th Update: We’ve released a new & improved version of our Craigslist template! Details here

WOW! is all I have to say about this.

Craigslist is now removing all externally-hosted images and most other formatting from your real estate posts.

That is, your beautiful posts created using various Craigslist templates like TourVista’s are now stripped naked and in most cases looking very ugly. 

No images. No fancy styling. No well-designed layout. 

Just plain text and some minor formatting like bold and italics. Excuse me while I barf.

TourVista's original Craigslist template (left) shows images and other styling. Craigslist converts it all to boring, plain text (right).
TourVista’s original Craigslist template (left) shows images and other styling. Craigslist converts it all to boring, plain text (right).

Is this just an effort to blast us all back to 1995? I don’t think so. Craigslist has always gone the route of “less is more” with their design and overall user experience. Instead, it feels more like a way to manage the look of all posts for consistency in an effort to level the playing field for everyone.

No need to freak out…

While this does have most real estate marketers in a state of shock, it is actually good news.  By removing all images and fancy styling and forcing all posts to be plain text, ANYTHING that we can do to make your text better than just plain text will help it stand out.

And that’s what we are working on right now — an updated Craigslist template that takes your property info from TourVista and generates “better than plain text” copy/paste code to help it POP on Craigslist.

Stay tuned… and let us know if you have any ideas!

Nov 20th Update: Better yet – no TourVista account required! Visit tourvista.com/craigslist

Nov 14th Update: We’ve released a new & improved version of our Craigslist template! Details here

Matt, TourVista Founder

November 13, 2013 at 2:32 pm PST

PS: Craig sends his love 🙂

Craigslist Lays the Smack Down!
Craigslist takes the hammer to your once pretty ads and makes them all plain text, eck.

6 thoughts on “Craigslist Lays the Smack Down on Real Estate Listings!

  1. This is a grea service if TourVista can pull this off! Your clientele should be very appreciative of this as CL Posts with just plain text are SO BORING! Good work TourVista!

  2. I think that if Craiglist is going to this, they should at least step up their game, and bring the look of their website into the 21st century!

  3. Thanks for the post. I think many lead generation companies are going to get crushed by this change since most of them rely on a huge amount of there traffic from clist. On the other hand I think this change will help the agents with large inventories of listings quite a bit because all the spammy ads will be gone. Thoughts?

    1. The traffic is still there on Craigslist, no doubt about that. In fact, when testing our new template for my condo I received around 15 leads in 24 hours! So, Craigslist is still #1 when it comes to getting eyeballs on your listing.

      It will be interesting to see if the graphic design and layout improvements from TourVista’s new template make a significant difference in generating leads compared to the plain text ads that most users will be posting to Craigslist. Common sense and my experience tells me that absolutely, a nicer looking ad will get a better response.

      Please share your experience so we can all learn what works best. Cheers!

Leave a Reply