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Padmapper skirts around Craigslist cease and desist, brings back apartment listings with third-party API

Padmapper skirts around Craigslist cease and desist, brings back apartment listings with third-party API

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Despite receiving a cease and desist letter from Craigslist, Padmapper founder Eric DeMenthon has just announced plans to bring back apartment listings from the classifieds site using a third party API.

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Padmapper got some unwanted attention from Craigslist last month in the form of a cease and desist letter, which led the apartment listings aggregator to remove all content sourced from the classifieds site. It was a devastating blow for the tool, and founder Eric DeMenthon implored users to contact Craigslist executives in support of Padmapper's cause. Thus far the company hasn't budged on the matter, but DeMenthon has just announced plans to bring back Craigslist apartment results anyway.

Citing the major inconvenience that the situation is causing his users, DeMenthon says he plans to again integrate Craigslist listings into Padmapper with the help of a company called 3taps. They've developed an API that provides data from Craigslist while skirting around the Terms of Service that were cited in Craigslist's original complaint. It's an imperfect solution, he admits. "It’s not nice of me to do from Craigslist’s perspective, and I’d really love to just work with them to solve these problems, but my conscience is clear," he says, promising to continue sending traffic (Padmapper sees "millions" of monthly visitors) to the massive classifieds site.

DeMenthon says the changes are being implemented immediately and we can verify that Craigslist-sourced apartments are once again populating among our search results. We can't imagine Craigslist will be pleased with Padmapper's workaround, so don't be surprised to see this saga continue. In the meantime, you'll find his entire blog post on the latest development at the source below.