Making money from local real estate sites?

Does anyone do this? I was thinking of starting a local real estate site and ranking it first (not exactly easy... the keyword "'city' real estate" gets 165k broad and 12.1k exact searches, with a good amount of competition).

Are there any real estate companies out there that have affiliate programs with decent payouts though? Basically, starting a site like this would cut out the need for a buyers agent if the users searching directly and contacting the sellers agent...so if there are any programs out there, I assume they should pay fairly well?

What I'm seeing at the top right now are just all the listings from specific real estate teams who own their site and did their own SEO, so maybe getting mine to number 1 and then "leasing" the space to a top team could make some decent money. But in that case, it'd lack a lot of content for users as I try to rank it.

I'm sure if you got a site to page 1 for a keyword like that and pitched it to a few different agents/brokers in the same area of the website, you could get a good amount of money out of it.

What I would do is lease the site to them on a monthly basis. You gotta think, each deal for a real estate agent is worth like 2k at the least. If you're giving them even a few more clients a month, you should easily be able to lease the site out for several k each month.

Don't short yourself either. If you know they are making an extra 10k profit every month, I'd ask for about 5k of it. I see a lot of threads on here where people lease out sites for dirt cheap. You're in this for the money just as much as the client is. An even 50/50 split on something like that sounds fair to me.