When Michelle and I first moved to Pittsburgh, we spent a long time on Craigslist looking for a place to live. But we quickly found that the majority of Craigslist was run by two or three main companies: Forbes Management, Regent Square Rentals, and Lobos.

Given the limited amount of time that we were in Pittsburgh, and the fact that real humans don’t start listing their apartments in Pittsburgh until a month or so before the start of the lease, these three companies were essentially our options, and so we chose to go with Regent Square Rentals, which was an okay experience, actually, even though I’m about to badmouth them all over the place, but we were nowhere near as happy as we are with our current house, owned by a human, a very nice one, in fact.

I want to share the patterns I started recognizing in order to find the house I am now living in, and the patterns that helped us find housing for some of our friends, and talk about some of the real-world ramifications of Craigslist spam.

Basically this is how I came to see Craigslist — I WAS the algorithm, because I had none. I learned how to filter pages and pages of Craigslist in the blink of an eye.

The hardest company to recognize is Lobos — I believe Craiglist kicked them out or something, because at some point during our search, they stopped putting their name on things, and only putting their number, and the name of an agent. Or perhaps this was in an attempt to seem more human-like: you present the facade of humanity to hide the giant company looming behind? Anyway, once in a while, their ads would fool me, and I’d click on them, but immediately back out once I saw the number, which is drilled into the back of my brain in flashing neon lights with a giant NO next to it.

What is interesting is that this sort of spam-sifting became a completely embodied experience. It was less of a mental capacity, more of a combination of scrolling and scanning, scrolling and scanning, and I didn’t even have to think, really. I’d pop windows into new tabs that were from humans, and evaluate those tabs, ignoring everything else. It was almost meditative. It made the labor of looking through Craigslist much easier once I found what the signifiers of posts from big companies looked like.

This is important because Regent Square Rental’s business plan is to hook a customer by flooding Craigslist with millions of ads, send their peppy young house-showers on commission around with people to give the illusion of normalcy, offer apartments that pretend to be in Regent Square but are actually in Wilkinsburg, skimp on repairs and maintenance, tell the residents they must renew their lease starting 6 months before it ends, parade people around the apartment unit starting 6 months before the lease ends, then raise the rent $40/month at the end of the lease. Nobody really would WANT to stay in this situation. But that’s not the point. The point is the 1-year lease that forces to you stay a whole year in the first place.

The RSR model relies on the hook itself — I have never seen more people moving in and out of an apartment building. And if you do decide to stay, given, perhaps the cost and stress and labor of moving, you will be paying $500 more for the same deal (this happened both to us and to a friend as well). Most don’t.

The hook is only possible with the creation of an excessive amount of automatically generated Craiglist ads. So for RSR, spam IS the business model. The difference between this kind of spam and the hacking/virus/phishing spam is that it’s entirely legal, actually. Given a certain amount of infrastructure, and a good bot, RSR can maintain a relatively healthy tenant occupancy, despite not responding to complaints or maintenance calls, despite not having a good relationship with any of their tenants, despite invasive and almost illegal lease agreements (almost).

Anyway, I just find it interesting how their business works, and how spam can, in some cases, even in this current iteration of the drama, be completely legal, despite ripping off unsuspecting people and causing a large amount of discomfort in people’s lives.