Location search uses a different search engine called Zappy which is still unavailable to opensource community, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use location search in opensource version,
using this patch https://github.com/sharetribe/sharetribe/pull/3256 you can make Sphinx (currently available search engine) work for location search
Apply patch:
wget https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/sharetribe/sharetribe/pull/3256.patch
patch -p1 <3256.patch
after applying the patch do
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake ts:stop
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake ts:rebuild
#restart server
#restart delayed jobs
More details at https://www.sharetribe.com/community/t/external-search-in-use-problem