Is Craigslist Safe for Apartment Hunters?

The short answer to this question is yes.

A slightly longer answer would be, hell yes.

The third answer is, which isn’t an answer but just another comment I want to make, is that appeals to reason are a bad strategy for coping with a brand disaster. Developers often make the mistake of assuming that other people are as rational as they are. This is why most companies use user interface consultants and marketing and PR people—because developers don’t think like users and customers.

Back to the safety thing. The recent unpleasantness on CL is something we at OMB could try to exploit. (Use OnMarketBoston—certified 100% murder free!) But we won’t, because that would be wrong. Like shouting fire a crowded movie house. Like fear-mongering about a flu epidemic.

Things that Craigslist, any section, (including the recently discontinued serial killer dating forum), is safer than:

1. Driving a car.
2. Walking.
3. Bathing.
4. Golfing.
5. Swimming.
6. Eating.
7. Not eating.

We’re hoping the folks at CL hire some PR and marketing types, pronto, to advise them on how to get out of this mess, because Craigslist is on the whole a good thing, for more than a simple majority of users, but for most users.

But this is the point of this article; the reason OnMarketBoston can never have this kind of problem is, our content isn’t user-generated. OnMarketBoston is a walled garden. Sometimes walled gardens are the best answer to certain problems on the web; sometimes they’re a disaster. Boston’s unique real-estate market makes our system work; the fact that a handful of agencies have access to 95% of the public listings in the metro region means that end users are well served by our site.

We stand by our business model. It makes OnMarketBoston, as the expression goes, safe as houses. Even safer than the already safe-enough Craigslist. Plus, zero redundancy, third-party certified.