I haven’t listed on Craig’s List for 3 or 4 years, but this weekend I put up a bunch of furniture for sale. I love the original concept of C, but it may be dying from it’s success. Here are my experiences:
– Absolutely brain dead people who wanted to know if the the queen sized bed set was full or queen sized. This took 4 email exchanges to resolve.
– One guy tried the send a check for over the amount, send back the rest, and keep $100 for your trouble scam. And this was on a $200 item. Watch out. CL warns against scams, but refers you to other sites if you want to report one. No self policing, which I found disappointing.
– Site unseen, people wanted price reductions.
– " Please deliver the item, and I’ll pay you went you get here". Didn’t happen.
– Some people in serious hurt offering trades of really valuable and cherished personal items for a 15 year old bed because relatives were coming to visit, and they had no place to put them and they were ashamed. Take a post dated check until my unemployment check comes through in 10 days and hold my metal detector as collateral. I felt bad about turning that one down. Truly. If he calls back, I’ll work something out for him.
– Met a couple of sterling people who followed through, called to touch base, and left with some great deals.
CL used to be a really cool way to see what was going on in the private real estate market. Over the last few years the Realtors discovered the site, and now over 95% of the listings are by agent and not by the owners. I guess this is how they earn their side of the transactions. When you sort the listings by "owner", you get a lot of mobile homes, Realtors pretending to be the owner, and real owners in clinical denial about the value of their homes. But once in a blue moon the sellers are for real, so I keep looking for stories I can tell you.
Have you also given up on Craig’s List as a real estate resource? And what have been your experiences with CL in general?
dave
Mike,
Don’t give up too soon. My experience selling miscellaneous household stuff has been fine, but haven’t tried real estate via CL. I’d say go easy on the callers at first…I’m still confused about why a twin bed is sized for one person. Maybe you’ve got people don’t know how big the queen is or what size bed she needs?
I think dealers posing as owners should be banned from CL. And someone’s still trying the over payment scam? You had a fun weekend.
inclinejj
Craigslist used to be like the online version of the college bulletin board..
You need to buy or sell something put it on the bulletin board, need a ride home for break, etc
Too bad lots of scammers and jack asses have taken it over
I have had good luck selling extra tickets and excellent luck renting out apartments and units..
billddrummer
I found a new apartment on CL, lower rent and more bedrooms/baths, lower deposits and rent specials.
I don’t know whether it’s a good source for real estate sales and purchases, though.
DonC
Our friends who live a couple of blocks away moved to east for a business opportunity. Since they intend to return they put their house out for rent with an asking price of 10K/month.
For reasons still not entirely clear his brother put the house on an internet site — not CL by the way. Very quickly there were all kinds of people stopping buy to look at the house. When asked, they said they had seen it advertised on CL for $2K/month.
The scam worked like this. When the prospect called the number listed in CL, they were told that the owner was out of town and all they had to do was to send the first month’s check and the owner would send them the keys.
Notifying CL didn’t help because the fraudster would simply relist it with the details changed. At some point the fraudulent rental turned into a fraudulent sale. The rental worked better since the dollar amount was lower and the story was more believable because rentals generally don’t have formal closing processes.
Our friends finally printed a couple of big signs that warned of an internet scam. That seems to have done the trick. But man there are a lot of gullible people out there — the price was just too good to be true. Which is was.
What’s interesting is that there have been some similar scams involving real estate agents who use the passkeys to actually “show” the house to the prospective renters aka victims.
CommercialLender
DonC,
I’m very familiar with a story in Sacramento area where a person who had already been foreclosed on was listing her former house as a rental. She’d post her photos and floorplans and of course answered any questions. Not sure in this particular case if she’d actually shown the house to the tenant, which would seem to require breaking in (bank would presumably have changed the lock), but apparently she was looking to collect the deposit and maybe a few months’ rent before the overloaded bank could catch up to her. Tenant of course would have to file suit or criminal charges.
I hope there’s a special place in hell for fraudsters like this…
Carney
There was a time when CL was a decent place to see what FSBO real estate there was out there. Now it has been totally taken over by realtors and is no different than going to the MLS. It has lost all its utility as a place to look for houses for sale.
DonC
CL – Yeah. My favorite is the woman who was recently sentenced for embezzling a lot of money from Girl Scout Cookie sales! Priceless.
The funny thing is that it keep happening. Trust is a great thing but you can definitely have too much of a good thing.
I went looking for a report about the real estate agents renting houses out. Apparently the idea isn’t new. Here’s one from 2007:
http://www.10news.com/news/14282036/detail.html
Gary
Since you also asked about CL “in general,” I got my first experience with it after I sold my house about a year ago. When I was sure the home sale was solid, I was in a hurry to get rid of a few things, so I gave some great deals. I had nothing but good experiences with CL.
The craziest buyers I had were a couple of late teens who drove all the way from South Lake Tahoe to east Sparks to buy my ping-pong table. That’s a long enough drive in itself, but the return trip must have seemed so much farther with a ping-pong table strapped to the top of their jeep. I hope the table was still in good shape when they got home, because they were looking forward to having their first tournament that night.
I wouldn’t use CL to sell real estate, but once the real estate was sold, CL was a great way to downsize my collection of personal property.