Like many of the other online homebuyers in the Bay Area, you might be searching Craigslist for a great deal. But unless you stay glued to your computer screen, there is no good way to be the first to find out about the best new listings on the site.
That’s why we were psyched to hear about 4info.net’s Craigslist Alert System. The service claims to update you via cell phone text message when the latest posts hit the site.
Sadly though, the site over promises and under delivers in our opinion. First off, we could even set up an alert since after trying three different cell numbers, we continued to get this error message. Frankly, we are not even sure what it means considering we have unlimited text options on all the phones, but we’ll let that slide.
Even still, it seemed like the service does not offer enough filtering criteria to make it worth your while. It only allows the user to filter to a board geography (ex. Bay Area) and not further. It also does not allow the user to set price criteria, but rather does a keyword filter. Keywords are less helpful on Craigslist as there is no standard to post titles.
Great idea, but not well executed. We’ll continue to check in and see when the error gets resolved, until then, I guess we’ll have to stick with our tried and true page refresh craigslist strategy.
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Raymond Stoklosa, Broker/Co-Owner
Chela Stoklosa, Realtor/Co-Owner
Sorry you had that bad experience! We experienced a bug that affected users from December 1-3rd, that caused this error. If you experienced this problem after that date, we’d love to know about it so we can investigate the cause. Give us another try, please!
I’m a big fan of our CraigsList alert, but it does need to be used with some caution. The first time I used it I was looking for a couch, and that’s a search term that is posted VERY often, so I got a lot of text notifications! But for collectors items, or jobs that are specialized and not frequently posted, it’s perfect.