USA local search engine

[localsearchengine]

Hello everybody.
I'm developing a website, oriented to products and services for local users. For a lot of reasons I would like to create subdomains for each state of USA. As my own site is still mostly in my mind, to get an idea of what I'm looking for - you can look here Illinois real estate or here New Hampshire fsbo properties (this is certanly not the best example of webdesign and usability, BUT those guys made EXACTLY what I need from the point of view of subdomains).
So my question is the following: how is it better to configure DNS and web-server to make the same way (I will use linux hosting). Truly speaking I know how to make it working for 3-4 subdomains but if we make 50 different independent subdomains - the maintenance and support will by very difucult.
Thank you in advance.

[megri]

Google consider each sub domain differently so you have to optimize each sub domain separately to get best traffic from search engines.