Craigslist is dying for two big reasons.

The first is that a majority of apartment research is conducted on mobile devices nowadays. Most people don't have a native Craiglist app on their phone, but they most certainly have a native Google search app. And because we live in an on-demand society, few people want to take the extra steps of heading to Craigslist.org, filtering to city/state, clicking on apartment search, filtering for price and bedroom, etc. etc. when they could (alternatively) just type "studio apartments in Philadelphia $1200" into Google and get hundreds of results IMMEDIATELY. And make no mistake, this is also the same exact reason Pay Per Click is on the rise: It allows you to rank directly on Google for these very precise searches.

The second reason has to do with demographics: Millennials don't use craigslist too often. And Millennials are the largest renting demo. The only Millennials who might use Craigslist are those who live in college towns, where most rental properties are converted homes and duplexes, rather than large rental communities.

That said, I'm not sure if multifamily should ignore craigslist altogether. If you have the time, any lead generating source is nice to have. But if you're stretched for time/resources, you definitely should be putting more effort into PPC and paid social media than you put into Craigslist.