What platform do you recommend for building a site like this, airbnb.com (can you tell what it is built on?). Only major difference (besides market niche) would be a bit more integration with some of the major social networking sites and features, third part comment system integration with perhaps disqus and some video bloging.
If you have any idea regarding time needed for the job, and cost that it might imply, please post that too. Thanx!
As I suspected, it looks like a Ruby on Rails site, and they were hiring a RoR developer back in April. A site like this can be done (and has been done) in most every web-friendly language -- PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Python.
This site has a lot of features, including booking, reviews, and a nice interface. I haven't worked on a project quite like it, but I assume it took a few people more than a few months to get it designed, implemented, and up and running. My guesstimate would be $100,000 in developer costs as a minimum.
If it were me, I would use Django to make a site like this. If you look around at some of the existing Django apps, I think you will find that many of the features on that site have already been implemented in reusable Django apps.
Using this approach, I think you would be able to produce a similar site for quite a bit less than Mr Brasee has suggested.