Actually, the quality of the craigslist listings on Padmapper, and on craigslist in general, seem to have fallen over the past year, too. Not sure if it's the overall market or just craigslist. I was trying to disprove it by looking in Menlo just now, but unfortunately(?) just found an utterly amazing place for $2100 which is about 50% less than I would have thought, which kind of goes against this. Not from Craigslist, but from a property management company.

Just focus on making the SV/SF market amazing using padlister or partnerships with property managers. Displace Craigslist in real estate in their home market.

Yeah, when it comes to housing, the barbarians are at the gate, in the form of scammers/spammers, and Craigslist isn't really set up structurally to deal with them very well.

Maybe. I've been apartment hunting with PadMapper in NYC lately, and it's amazing how much of the postings on Craigslist (particularly no-fee) are just outright bullshit. It's a much higher proportion than the other big NYC-local sites that do no-fee search.

For my geographical area at least, the removal of Craiglist might improve the signal-noise ratio.