Starting to despair..

[pari]

recently designed a site for a client to advertise his condo rental in florida.
as the client is also a friend - (and also i wanted develop my SEO skills) i decided to try and optmise it for him. over the last few months i have read up on a lot of stuff and had a few forum discussions too.

i never expected to be able to get a really good positions for it, on any popular keyphrases (on google) however - i am beginning to wonder whether i am ever going to get anywhere on any keyphrase that relates to the site.

the thing is that the serps for almost every keyphrase that i think relates to the site seems to be utterly dominated by the large sites with multiple listings.
i know that google prefers large sites, and also they have a huge advantage of internal links and content etc. but I am starting to wonder if a site my size with zero budget, can compete at all

my site has about 36 pages in all - however only about 10 pages have reasonable content on them (average 500 words a page) the other 26 pages have just a photo on them and a couple of sentences.


is there any way i could get the site to appear in any keyphrases that are worth while? or has a site my size got no chance in such a competitve arena?