Dear Cameron,
I'm a bit confused as to what you are trying to accomplish. If you say you would like to query 3 posts of CPT "estate-sales", do you mean display only 3 posts in the homepage? Also how you are going to use the custom fields you have mentioned like wpcf-sale-start-date & wpcf-sale-end-date)? Are you going to use them for ordering the posts? or just display them along with the posts?
If you are not using Views, you can write your own code using the WP Query Class: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Query and all custom PHP code will be placed in your theme functions.php.
It's a powerful tool to any developers wanting to customize queries in WP. If you want some help on your code, please post your code and explain what you are going to accomplish exactly so I can review your code and suggest ways on how to make it work. If you have a demo or test site on this one, that would also be helpful so please provide it.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Emerson