Craigslist rolls out new Map View feature for apartment searches

Even as it’s locked in a legal dispute with apartment hunting sites over use of its data, Craiglist has released its own mapping feature for the apartment listings on its website. The service appears to be rolling out gradually, as it showed up in several cities, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, but it wasn’t available on the New York and London sites.

Craigslist’s plans weren’t exactly a secret, given that it had filed multiple cease & desist actions and lawsuits against PadMapper and other sites in an effort to block them from scraping its data. It has been on the receiving end as well, as data supplier 3taps has filed a countersuit against Craigslist alleging antitrust violations and unfair competition.

The new functionality allows users to toggle between the traditional list view and a map view. Not all posts are mappable yet, as about half of the results on one search in the Bay Area didn’t make it onto the interface. It’s a nice implementation, though, with colored circles marking the density of listings in a given area.

The maps are powered by the Leaflet javascript tool and make use of data from OpenStreetMap.

The feature is still a bit rough around the edges, as we found ourselves sometimes having to reload the search page to get the map to display. The classified site began testing adding maps to apartment postings back in August.

(hat tip @Colleran)

Image credit: stock.xchng