Advice on creating featured properties for categories and custom uListing views

Hi, advice greatly appreciated. Apologies for the length of the post.

In short, via Views and CCK modules, I am attempting to set a featured property for each property category and creating views for those featured properties. Is this possible via Views and CCK?

Background: I am building a property site and have uListing installed and the default configuration and functionality works great, thank you for the hard work.

I would like some custom requirements and I would like some advice on implementing these. I am very much new to Drupal and while I have been building sites in PHP for some time now, at the moment I feel a little lost at sea with Drupal!

A synopsis of the functionality i would like follows and after that my approach so far.

I would like to be able to set a featured property for each property category. Pull those category featured properties into a view that is displayed in a region / block across the bottom of the page (as thumbnails). This featured property would be the only property displayed on that property category landing page.
Set a 'High Yield' and 'Quick Turn Around' property each displayed in their own block.
Look at an alternate way of setting a single featrured property on the front page, other than via 'promote to front page'. I would like to create a single 'Featured Properties' management form which facilitates the viewing and resetting the properties for each featured area.

What I have attempted is to add Custom Fields within uListing management, a check box for each of Front page property, high yield property and quick turn around property and a select box containing the categories for the category featured property. Adding custom fields was no problem.

Then using Views i attempted to create a view for the home page, the aim being to find that property that has been set as home page feature via the extradetail_ check box.

I found that within views:

The extradetail_ variables were not available to use as filters or arguments
While taxonomy terms were available (regions, listing features, listing information), inputted information such as location and features and property details were not.
In addition, images were not displayed within a resulting view.

I am now going to attempt crating additional fields via CCK and using those as filters as arguments.

Any input greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Patrick