Hello,
I'm Anna - a business development manager of A2 Design - a Russian-Canadian web development company with 14 years of experience.
You can check our recent projects on our website [The administrator removed this message for encouraging communication outside Freelancer.com, which breaches our Terms and Conditions - Section 13: Communication With Other Users.]
We understand your project. Our clients are mainly startups from the US/ Canada, so we know how to deal with such big projects and we can offer you a solution.
Craiglist is a very complex project, that has a lot of intricate functionality. It has been in the process of building for a few years and had many funding rounds.
What we can offer you is to build a minimum viable product that is going to take a month or so to be complete.
We use agile software development approach, which means that the whole project is split into several phases that are implemented one by one. This way it'll be easier for us to make an accurate estimation. And you won’t have to pay all the money at once but see the project progress and pay accordingly. It’s a win-win situation.
For instance, after the first phase you'll get an advertisement catalog. It will be fully functioning, so search engines will index your website. Since your goal is to get the product to early customers as soon as possible - that's exactly what is going to happen: people will be able to choose companies from your catalog. Every new phase will take from a week up to a month.
Feel free to ask me any questions.
Regards, Anna