how best to manage home directories?

Answer 1

Put them on their own partition.
Give them a quota.
Back them up regularly.

Answer 2

The best way to manage any type of drectory is with PHP and MySQL. Create a form that will allow your visitors to post to the site, and create a querry that will show all relevant info based on the zipcode or area code criteria. If you have highspeed internet and want to be brave, I recommend a package like Xampp or the likes, that has PHP, MySQL and other stuff for running your own server. My site below under Server Talk tells all about the requirements for this. Hope this helps