Hello,
Building an Online Auction Site web site is a complex project since it’s necessary to include such features as filters and search, bidding system, payments, history, private messaging.
Moreover, the auction website needs a very solid database, which means that this work isn't for WordPress. The technology stack (PHP + MySQL) has very high levels of maintainability/ customization as well as scalability. WordPress won't give you enough freedom to add functionality in the future and it won't account for highload, and as far as I can see, there'll be lots of users.
We’ve built several big web applications incorporating these features.
See our portfolio here [The administrator removed this message for encouraging communication outside Freelancer.com, which breaches our Terms and Conditions - Section 13: Communication With Other Users.]
There are two main solutions that we can offer you: build a website from scratch or use a premade script (that already has lots of features and thus can save some time on development).
Based on our experience, development of web apps with similar functionality is lengthy. Proper process includes following stages: planning, development, quality assurance, deployment and support. Similar project would roughly take 1000 man-hours, so overall, it'll take 6 months and cost $20K.
I see you get many bids around $1K. Beware of those who promise to get it done for this price: they either underestimate the work or simply want to lure you in and ask for more money down the road once the development is in progress, lots of time is wasted and it's too late to go back.
Reach out!