About

Injects an interactive price histogram filter for Craigslist searches.

Why

While searching for goods, housing, etc. on Craigslist it can be difficult to understand what the market looks like. This extension gives valueable insight in the price distribution of the market for a given product.

Installing

First clone the repo and install the dependencies with yarn install or npm install:

git clone git@github.com:jappareti/craigslist-price-histogram.git
cd craigslist-price-histogram
yarn install

To build for development and watch for changes, run:

yarn run dev

Add the build folder ./dist to Google Chrome:

• In Chrome, navigate to chrome://extensions
• Make sure Developer Mode is toggled on in the top right.
• Click on Load unpacked
• Navigate to the craigslist-price-histogram folder on your computer
• Select the dist folder

Now, navigate to your local craigslist website and run a search query. For example, here's a search page for all of the 1 bedroom apartments available in San Francisco:

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?search_distance=4&postal=94117&min_bedrooms=1&max_bedrooms=1&availabilityMode=0&sale_date=all+dates

To build for production and deployment, run:

yarn run prod

Issues

• Sometimes the first time you click "Create Price Graph" it gets stuck on loading. If this happens, try refreshing the page. I'm working on a fix for this.
• How to handle outliers. Sometimes the poster mis-types the price which throws off the distribution. For instance, one time I found a 1 bedroom apartment available for $24,909, but what they probably meant was $2,499
• How to handle duplicates. The duplicate listings skew the histogram because they add duplicate data. Ideally the data from CL would be duplicate-free, but that's rarely the case. Fixing this would involve duplicate-detection and removing them from the price list that is used to build the histogram.