An Appeal to Craig Newmark et al: Please Fix The Rental Category

Purpose:

The signers of this petition are members of the Craigslist (CL) user community and have engaged or will engage with the community for the purposes of renting ( tenant ), or offering to rent ( owner ), or assisting with the rental of ( agent ) real property.

The goal of this petition in to demonstrate the very real need for the staff at CL to update and upgrade the real estate rental category of their website in order that this category may once again be usable and equitably shared by the majority of users.


The Issue:

A minority of real estate agents have increasingly violated the stated Terms of Use (TOU) of CL in order to monopolize the real estate rental user space.  If this is allowed to continue unabated, the ability of the aforementioned user groups to utilize this space will continue to erode to the point where no one can use it for its intended purpose.

Evidence of Abuse:

The Majority of These Ads:
 
Are not designed to advertise a single property so much as to advertise the professional services of an agent.  Many of them should not even be found in the "for rent" section.  They are thinly  veiled attempts to solicit the agent's professional services and should instead be posted to that category; a violation of terms (L,P) of the TOU

Include keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the property that they are "supposedly" advertising thus insuring that they are returned with virtually any query that a user attempts; a violation of terms (P,V) of the TOU

Use tricks such as embedding the agent's name and phone number in a jpg which circumvents CL parsing engines which are scanning for high volume duplicate posts; a violation of terms (P,V) of the TOU

Are posted many times per day; a violation of terms (P,V) of the TOU

Are being posted using scripts or other automated means. No agent could possibly devote the necessary time to individually submit 200+ ads per day to Craigslist.  Additionally the likelihood of a large block of ads being submitted sequentially without an ad from another party interrupting their flow is statistically impossible.  The process of posting is being automated by them, and this is a violation of terms (P,V,Y) of the TOU


Proposed Enhancements to the Craigslist System:

These are not meant to be inclusive.  They are just ideas which if implemented would greatly enhance the usability of the system while at the same time greatly limiting abusive behavior in the Real Estate Rental category, and possibly others.

DUPLICATE what has already been done in the Auto and   Furniture Sales categories.  Force commercial entities to register their ads under "For Rent by Agent" so that ads may be easily culled by renters who wish to either use an agent, or to instead rent directly from a landlord.

SEPARATE "Houses for Rent" from "Apartments for Rent".  This has been an obvious and necessary upgrade for a long time.  CL needs to help people to help themselves.  They can't do that if every ad is listed under the same category and can't be practically separated due to keyword abuse.

ENHANCE term (V) of the TOU contract to specifically PRECLUDE the use of non-relevant keyword placement in ads.  It is a grossly manipulative and selfish act which has no place in a shared community.  If a user's ad is intended to specifically rent one type of structure, and that user deliberately inserts the names of other types of structures in the ad, then the obvious goal of that insertion was to have it returned in queries which didn't pertain to it.  This is harmful to all users who want to use the system effectively.  It should be possible for the CL parser to flag certain obvious keywords such as house / condo / duplex / apartment and reject the post if a user attempts to use more than one of them.

REMOVE the "Best of Craigslist" flag from Real Estate.  CL has its share of memorable posts.  However the likelihood of finding such a post in a Real Estate section is not even measurable, whereas the potential for abuse with such a flag is epic.  It appears that when that flag is clicked the ad becomes sticky and is much harder to flag off the system.  As such, unscrupulous abusers of the system have learned to incorporate that action into their posting tools in order to make their abusive behavior more bullet proof.

ENHANCE the parsing algorithms that are run at posting time to search for multiple occurrences of words ending in jpg, or gif, or png  If [agents-ugly-face.jpg] is found 200 times in already existing ads, then it is a pretty safe bet that this agent is violating the TOU and creating usurious amounts of ads in the same category.

Summary

In a more perfect world where everyone played nicely such enhancements would never be necessary.  This unfortunately does not appear to be the case.  Throughout the years CL has become a vital, integral and deeply entrenched service which people use both to look for housing, as well as to offer it for rent.  The undersigned believe that it is imperative that the designers and maintainers of Craigslist acknowledge the value that their website brings to the community; recognize how that value is being usurped by an unscrupulous few; and take the relatively minor steps required to open the system back up to the majority.

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