[eli_s]

I like your idea. My personal gut feeling is that there is still lots of room for innovation and money to be made in the local online market.

I think you need to find a way of getting people to come back to the site even before there are many(any) others using it. Some tool that is useful in its own right that will encourage people to sign up and keep visiting. From then on the community aspect will become a bonus as the site grows.

Also the design is quite unappealing - maybe paying a designer a few hundred dollars for a PSD would be a good idea.