Craigslist car listings will cost private sellers $5 beginning April 15

While we enjoy complaining about navigating the minefield of its car listings, everyone here at Hagerty loves Craigslist as much as the next gearhead. Packed with potential projects, the car and truck listings can bring bargains, but they often leave even the best attempts at a focused search littered with unwanted chaff. Nobody likes to sift through the scams and the spam. That may be changing now that Craigslist has announced a new policy to charge $5 per car listing.

First identified by a user on Reddit, beginning April 15, private party sellers will be charged $5 to post a car listing, just like dealers have been. Hopefully this will result in an increase in the quality of every listing and fewer scams.

With a modest fee now in play, we’d hope that sellers will be extra-certain the post is accurate so as to avoid being filtered out of searches. Or perhaps sellers will now come up with even more devious ways of getting as many eyeballs on their advertisement as possible and we’ll be fighting a whole new, never-before-seen scourge. Limitations, after all, often beget innovation.

The $5 burden on a private seller doesn’t seem like an unfair cost to reach the local market, and it has to make some impact on scammers that so far have seen no reason not to cast as wide a net as possible. Time will tell. For now, we remain optimistic and look forward to a less-cluttered Craigslist.

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