Craigslist Multi-City Listings Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Craigslist's own search pages (/search/area/<areaSlug>) and listing-detail pages (/view/d/<slug>/<postId>) -- fanned out across every metro area and category you pick, in one Actor call instead of one run per city. Point it at a single area, or union in a curated top-US-metro preset, pick one or all seven top-level categories, and get back a single normalized dataset: title, price, location, coordinates, images, posted and updated timestamps, structured attributes, description, and the public reply-flow link. Every request runs through our full anti-blocking stack by default -- rotating browser-fingerprint impersonation, session-rotated proxying, retries with backoff -- the same defenses every Devil Scrapes Actor ships, so your dataset holds up even if Craigslist changes its defenses tomorrow.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ We rotate browser fingerprints on every request -- curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome, Firefox, and Safari TLS/HTTP handshakes, so nothing about the traffic looks like a bare Python script, today or if Craigslist tightens up tomorrow.
• 🌐 We rotate Apify Proxy sessions -- a fresh session ID and exit IP on any request that comes back looking blocked, no manual restart needed.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx, honouring Retry-After -- up to 5 attempts before we give up on a page.
• 🧱 We pace to the target's rate limits and isolate faults per combo -- one slow metro or blocked category logs a warning and gets skipped; the rest of the run keeps going, and partial progress is always reported via a clear status message, never a silent empty dataset.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows -- every row is ResultRow-validated (Pydantic), ISO-8601 timestamps, stable post IDs, ready to export as JSON, CSV, or Excel.
• 💰 Pay-per-result pricing -- a small one-off actor-start charge, then you pay only for rows that land in your dataset.

Use cases

• Reseller and arbitrage price-scanning across dozens of metros in a single run, instead of one Actor call per city.
• Multi-city lead-generation list building for local-services and real-estate outreach.
• Rental and vehicle market intelligence -- price and inventory tracked across metros side by side.
• Apartment and job aggregation, normalized into one schema instead of stitching together per-city exports.
• Posting-velocity research -- track price drops and reposts via posted_at, updated_at, and is_edited_or_price_drop.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "areas": [
    "newyork"
  ],
  "allTopUsMetros": false,
  "categories": [
    "sss"
  ],
  "query": "iphone",
  "maxResultsPerCombo": 3,
  "fetchDetails": true,
  "postedWithinDays": null,
  "maxRunMinutes": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

area_slugcategory_codetitlepricelocation_textdetail_urlposted_atupdated_atis_edited_or_price_dropattributesreply_url

{
  "area_slug": "newyork",
  "category_code": "sss",
  "query": "iphone",
  "post_id": "7812345678",
  "title": "iPhone 14 Pro 256GB Unlocked",
  "price": 550.0,
  "currency": "USD",
  "location_text": "Queens",
  "latitude": 40.7282,
  "longitude": -73.7949,
  "images": [
    "https://images.craigslist.org/00A0A_abc_600x450.jpg"
  ],
  "detail_url": "https://www.craigslist.org/view/d/queens/7812345678",
  "posted_at": "2026-08-05T09:12:00-0400",
  "updated_at": "2026-08-09T14:03:00-0400",
  "is_edited_or_price_drop": true,
  "description": "Barely used, comes with box and charger...",
  "attributes": {
    "condition": "like new",
    "make": "apple"
  },
  "reply_url": "https://newyork.craigslist.org/reply/que/sss/7812345678/abc123",
  "repost_fingerprint": "a1b2c3d4",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-12T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Each (area, category) combo returns up to maxResultsPerCombo (max 300) -- Craigslist's observed single-page ceiling. There's no pagination past that in v1.
• Total combos (areas x categories, post-resolution) are capped at 150 per run, a FREE-tier compute guardrail -- split very large fan-outs across multiple runs.
• allTopUsMetros unions in a curated list of up to 25 metro slugs, not the full ~700-area Craigslist directory.
• One query term per run -- no multi-keyword search in a single call.
• reply_url is captured exactly as Craigslist renders it on the listing page. We never open it, solve any verification step it triggers, or de-obfuscate a masked email -- that boundary is deliberate, and Craigslist's own robots.txt disallows the reply flow.
• repost_fingerprint is a best-effort hash (normalized title + area + category), not a guaranteed unique dedup key.
• postedWithinDays only filters when fetchDetails is enabled -- posting date lives on the detail page only.