By Jim Cavan

The past few years haven’t exactly been kind to craigslist. Having been embroiled in numerous scandals that have tarnished the website’s already ambiguous reputation, people have been fleeing even the site’s more benign classifieds sections.

Luckily for the DIYers and home improvers out there, one California website is filling one of those previously empty niches – and getting attention for all the right reasons.

They’ve been featured in Star magazine’s “Hot Sheet”, Family Handyman’s “The Stuff We Love” section, made appearances on both the Live Well Channel’s “Gotta Know” as well as on a Charleston, South Carolina ABC affiliate’s morning news show, and their story has been scooped by dozens of blogs and other websites nationwide.

What is this handyperson’s craiglist?

It’s called DiggersList, and it’s a California-based website that’s become the go-to classifieds for building and home improvement materials, supplies, and services – all at cut rate cost, and all tailored to specific regions and cities.

The website, launched in October 2009, already houses individual sites for dozens cities across the country, including one for the New Hampshire Seacoast.

To say that DiggersList is growing would be a drastic understatement: the site has already tripled the number of affiliate cities and, according to its founder Matt Knox, more than 600 cities from across the United States, Canada and the U.K. put in requests to be next on the list just last month alone.

In fact, in the fifteen minutes this reporter spent talking on the phone with Knox, three more citizens had sent inquiries wondering when their city would find its way to a site which, according to its owner, includes 70,000 active users.

While its tremendous growth has been beyond impressive, its roots are, in a word, logical. After years working as an insurance broker for contractors in Southern California, Knox realized there really wasn’t an online outlet for excess materials and supplies from job sites. Having identified an as-yet unoccupied web niche, DiggersList needed a template off of which to spin its own unique service.

Not surprisingly, craigslist presented the obvious model, while telegraphing an obvious void.

“When we started parsing out how we were going to do this, we realized craigslist wasn’t specific enough for what we wanted to do,” explains Knox. “Now that we’ve gone from a national site back to one focused more on communities and individual cities, it’s been really encouraging.”

Aside from the familiar sounding name, the site looks and works much like craigslist; the home page is broken down into states, with cities and towns listed below. Once you select a city, you get a lengthy list of projects, services, and materials – everything from fill dirt to fireplaces, cabinets to carpet, patios to paints and pools, and all of it search engine-ready. Clicking on a specific item brings you to a page replete with pictures, information, an email form to contact the seller, as well as a list of other, similar items that might be more like what the shopper is looking for. Facebook and Twitter links allow users to post interesting services or items to their respective pages, lending even more eyes to DiggersLists’s unique and dynamic inventory.

The best part? It’s all free – free to join, free to use, and free to list, whether you’re a small business looking for another avenue to your customer or just someone who’s looking to get rid of an old wheelbarrow.

In creating the Seacoast New Hampshire site, DiggersList solicited the help of the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Dover, as well as Green Alliance, a local green business union and discount co-op. With ReStore DiggersList got an established source for second-hand building supplies, furniture, and home improvement products with which they could fill the site. With Green Alliance, DiggersList got a visible, multifaceted organization capable of trumpeting the inherent “green” qualities of a website dedicated to finding homes for quality, second-hand materials and products.

Tom Boisvert, Operations Manager at the Dover ReStore, has been particularly about the partnership and what it could do for local businesses. “It’s been a great way to increase our exposure, as well as the exposure of Diggerslist in this area,” says Boisvert. “We felt that by starting off with an extensive list of materials, we’d help Digger’s list get off to a good start here on the Seacoast. And luckily that seems to be what’s happened.”

But Boivert’s isn’t the only ReStore eager to hop on the DiggersList train: according to Knox, more than 50 ReStores from across the country have participated. Indeed, a ReStore provides any DiggersList hopeful with a crucial initial stock of hundreds – if not thousands – of items, so that viewers in the newly-minted cities aren’t looking at an empty website.

“Having ReStores and outlets like it help us direct traffic better than we ever could in the past, and in a lot of ways the New Hampshire site provided the model for that” explains Knox. “So [in new cities] people are ready to post as soon as a new site is open, which means we can just keep opening them faster.”

Faster indeed: just this week alone DiggersList is slated to launch sub-sites for Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio.

For all the obvious similarities, DiggersList includes a number of features which set it apart from craigslist, including promotional videos, a full-time blog, photo albums, and a “builder’s forum” where those in the industry can post their profiles and contact information. And then there’s DiggersList’s latest addition – a particular source of pride for its founder: a function that allows users posting items for sale to donate that item if, after anywhere from one to 30 days, the item doesn’t find a taker.

In less than six months, the New Hampshire DiggersList in particular has grown to include an ever-burgeoning inventory of products, services, contractors, and Green Alliance member businesses, including ReStore (Dover), Ultra Geothermal (Barrington), SEA Solar Store (Dover), Ridgeview Construction (Deerfield), Scarponi Electric (Rochester), ZESstudio (Lee), not to mention the GA itself.

The result, according to GA Director Sarah Brown, is a New Hampshire DiggersList that is thoroughly green. “When you think about how much has been made available and how close it is, it’s really remarkable,” says Brown. “Short of spending your money at a big box store, it’s hard to imagine a more convenient source for building supplies and materials – and you can feel a lot better about it knowing it’s all re-used, repurposed and recycled.”

Despite DiggersList’s meteoric rise, Knox remains as humble as he is committed to making sure that his brainchild doesn’t end up just another classifieds site.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want to be just another craigslist; we want to foster a genuine community,” says Knox. “It’s a rare thing and a rare opportunity to create something that’s genuinely new and something people actually want, and having the kind of response we’ve had so far just makes it that much more fun.”

To learn more about DiggersList and to register for their New Hampshire site, go to www.diggerslist.com
For more information about the Green Alliance, go to www.greenalliance.biz