WANTED: Information on how to monetize a huge authority real estate website!

depending on how you are pulling these auctions, i.e. plugins/scripts, you can place a filter to simply filter them out.

sounds like you have a lot of ideas and the name of the game is testing so do some testing, split testing, etc etc. Getting the right type of traffic there will determine which monetization method you should use.... for instance, which keyword phrases will bring traffic and what that traffic is looking for... info? buy now? maybe CPA would work best.

You get the traffic and making money with it is the easy part... because ultimately, you test your options until you find which works best for you and your site

Build and sell leads. Real estate and/or mortgage leads are a crapload of money. I think most leads are generated by showing only limited listings unless they sign up or whatever.

I have never used eBay and they are hard to get accepted into. But I think you should have decent results from AdSense and Clickbank products.

There is good money in producing leads, but I am not sure how you would accomplish it as you would need to have people in all localities to distribute them to. Unless you can work with a company that resells yours and others leads. If there is such a company.

I saw the word "real estate" and I had to stop by. I'm in new york doing loan mods, short sales, note buying... mostly to do with distressed real estate.
I like your enthusiasm. I'm new and I run on optimism, mountain dew and double rainbows(only) myself. It's good that there is something like me out there, brother.

As the others suggested, you are in for some stiff competition.
For the site itself, you're going to have to find a way to generate 1000+ pages worth of quality content. You better have a really good plan for this since you don't like spammy sites. ( I think spam tastes good) What you could do is to commission a 1000 articles filled with good keywords which can be monetized through adsense. If you can make your readers generate content for you it will be even better.

Here is another thought. Instead of going after users or ebay listings, organize your realtor/broker friends and promote them. The big brokerages have pretty good websites and exclusive access to their databases. But individual brokers/realtor website usually suck big time! Make them the superstars of their area through article, blogs, video, feature listings, tips, industry news and so on. You can do this for flat fee or commisions based on leads.(tracked by different phone number and email addresses)
Just a thought. Go Real estate!

your question is actually an eye-opener to me.. dealing with a property site but still not able to monetize it well enough.

If you're really going to be an authority and have a lot to offer your readers, then a good way is through mini-ebooks sold on your site, Amazon and Smashwords.

Why do you want to create an authority site ? The smart players focus on geo targeted markets. How about "homes for sale broward county" ? That long tail gets 2,200 searches a month ( I just checked). And guess what ? homes-for-sale-broward-county.com" is available.

Create a few dozen sites like that with useful info on the local markets. Once you build some traffic I'm telling you it won't be hard to attract deals with local mortgage brokers for referral commissions.

You don't need a flood of traffic folks, you just need a trickle of highly targeted traffic with $1,000-$4,000 referral fees from $500k mortgage deals.

Any one want to bet "homes-for-sale-broward-county.com" will be registered before happy hour tomorrow ? LOL!