Those are not paid listings. I am not sure about the yellow highlighting, maybe that is a setting within your browser. I can get the same page with FireFox and IE, but not with the highlighting.
META tags are used to tell the SE what your positive/negative keywords are and also to provide a description that will be displayed in the results of a search query. (META can also be used for other items like copyright, author, etc. but the two important ones are keywords and description)
For exmaple, the second listing, "Westbay..." their META description will be "Coldwell Banker Commercial Westbay Real Estate Group. offers the unique mix..."