As I watched The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last night (Yes, I'm guilty), I received an email from the contractor we had hired to rehab one of my Corporate owned listings, telling me that he had overbooked himself, and wouldn't be able to start on Monday as planned. I immediately enter panic mode, as my seller holds us to strict timelines on rehab. Before I enter into full panic mode, I place a call to a colleague, who refers me to two local San Diego Contractors. I call both, and unfortunately, both were unavailable. I then decide that my best option at this point is to post on Craigslist under jobs, as I had 48 hours to get another contractor on board, and one that could adhere to the pricing guidelines given by the seller.
I log onto Craigslist, navigate to the jobs section, and click post. Much to my surprise, "$25.00 per category selected" is written in red at the top of the page. Before jumping to conclusions, I navigated through several other pages of the site, such as Housing, Personals, and For Sale, thinking that maybe they just started charging across the board for postings, but this is not what I found! After a quick search on Google for the topic, I realized that Craigslist has decided to charge solely for Job postings in major cities such as San Diego and Los Angeles in Southern California.
So let's break this down. Craigslist doesn't charge for "Personals", which in my opinion is simply legal prostitution. The ads under this section are basically "I want it now", or "I need it now", and they are FREE. They don't charge under the categories "For Sale" and "Housing", but they DO charge for employers to post jobs. Does anyone else see a MAJOR PROBLEM with this? In California we have an unemployment rate of 12.4%, which is only the "posted rate", and doesn't include the people who either didn't qualify for unemployment, or who's unemployment benefits simply ran out. So does it really make sense to charge for job postings, in a state where WE NEED more jobs?! Sounds like Craig needs to GET A CLUE!
Now it's comment time
