Home improvement services is a wild new frontier that has just scratched the tip of its potential, according to segment leaders at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media event at San Francisco Airport.

“ServiceMagic/Home Advisor is (only) a couple of hundred million dollars. Angie’s has never made a profit. The market is ripe but no one is there yet,” said Home Depot Silicon Valley leader Anthony Rodio, who also serves as GM of the company’s Red Beacon contractor scheduling service. “The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is repeat business.”

Rodio noted that a real opportunity for the industry is that many millennials have moved away from DIY. “For some, their idea of a home project is upstreaming iTunes in the living room,” he said. But Home Depot is traditionally geared around DIY. The company hasn’t done enough to develop ‘Do it For Me’, said Roddio.

Serviz leader Zorik Gordon, the former ReachLocal leader, said that the void in the industry is that the segment is not transparent. Serviz will move away from unreasonable 300-500 percent upsells, and provide price charts, and reviews; it will also assign contractors, said Gordon, who says the startup will move beyond southern California, where it launched in July, and will reach 10-20 cities by the end of 2015.

Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta noted that his company recently raised $100 million from Google and others. “What Google and others saw in us is that we have created a unique platform,” he said. “We have 600 unique categories.”

Thumbtack is taking a different approach than Serviz and The Home Depot’s Red Beacon in that it doesn’t assign jobs to service pros or collect money for jobs. Focusing on moving the money is “not the indicator” for the success of a transactional marketplace, he said.

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Red Beacon founder Ethan Anderson has unveiled his latest project, MyTime, a “scheduling supermarket” that sets dynamic pricing for unfilled appointments. Online scheduling intrigues us as a gateway towards promotions and transactions, but it remains underutilized by SMBs and the space is also highly fragmented.

The site launched today in Los Angeles with 1,106 “fully vetted” businesses participating. MyTime promotes open avails in service calendars with ads on social media, email and other channels. It takes a 40 percent, one-time commission from new customers that it attracts. Existing customers who use the system don’t cost the business anything. The system also handles online payment for businesses, sending out payments to businesses in the same day.

Anderson has been working on the project for a year, building a 15 person team. He has raised angel funding from scheduling vets such as Merchant Circle founder Ben T Smith IV, along with others such as Jason Calacanis and Dave McLure (500 Startups).

The site’s ambition is to aggregate as many businesses as possible on his “light” scheduling system to allow consumers to shop for appointments near them. It integrates data from 12 existing scheduling systems, including Google calendar, Zoc Doc, Schedulicity, iPhone/iPad and Android phones and others. A dozen more systems are being worked on.

Dynamic pricing is used to provide consumers with discount incentive during non-busy periods. Discounts could be 30 percent to 40 percent. Conversely, premiums can be charged for very busy times, such as Saturday mornings at hair dressers.

All services are guaranteed, and each service is vetted via social media and rating and review sites.While the site has 50 service categories, major segments are expected to be health and beauty, fitness, yoga, pet sitting and domestic services

Anderson says his experience launching Red Beacon, a services leads company, taught him that consumers want instantaneous service. “They don’t want to wait a day or two” to get a bid. All the pricing is right on the site and payments can be processed right there as well.

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Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.

The deal between BigTent and Redbeacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e.m ServiceMagic, AlikeList, HelpHive, ThumbTack and Sears’ ServiceLive) but also against other sites that specifically tailor to moms (and women generally). These include sites such as Angie’s List and Center’d. It plays on the theory that some women are intimidated by home and trade professionals and may be more likely to seek out a social network for advice and recommendations.

For BigTent, the partnership marks the first time it has partnered with an organization to promote local businesses. It had previously worked deals with a number of national brands.

The BigTent news caps off a campaign to land associations and other organizations as partners. The results of the effort means that the site now boasts listings of 16,000 service pros with the badges of their organizations — a major trust factor. One of the key prizes has been the local branch of the Better Business Bureau, which previously hadn’t loaned out its list.

In other site developments, Redbeacon, which won the top prize as best new idea at TechCrunch 50 six months ago, is adding “Friendly Advice.” The feature lets friends comment on job bids (and the bidders). This complements the company’s matching engine, and reviews and ratings found on other parts of the site — including both positive and negative reviews.

“We’re crowd-sourcing recommendations and sharing,” says CEO Ethan Anderson. One added benefit is the viral element and the added exposure for Redbeacon: 500 views may become 2,500, he says.

Anderson notes that the company has been in a constant state of “iteration” since launching, and will only begin the process of raising money when it is satisfied with the end product. So far, the site has added several features, such as enabling private communications between consumers and providers in the middle of a bid and allowing providers to additional information upon request. “Consumers need lots of information to make a decision,” he says. The site has also syndicated reviews from Yelp, Google and Yahoo to complement its own.

One milestone reached by the site is that it can now successfully furnish a quote for every job that is bid. In fact, it had more than 1,000 service providers almost immediately after launch, and continues to rapidly grow its base. “We don’t have a chicken or egg problem,” says Anderson. “Signing up (service providers) has been easy.”

Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson will join AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi and Reply.com COO Sean Fox on the “SMB Marketplaces” panel at Marketplaces 2010. ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith is a keynoter at the conference.

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