Auctioning off real estate, I am not sure I like it! - I get it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I have a few first time home buyers I am working with right now and a couple are in the lowest price 
range in our current market, so needless to say not only are there very few suitable properties, but they are all getting multiple offers and getting bid up. Good news for sellers, not so much for buyers.
In the past week I have bid on two separate auction properties on behalf of my clients, one fo the auctions had a starting bid price of $109K, or about half of what the neighborhood values were at, which is still very low in the Denver market. Now this home needs a lot of work and I mean a lot, it needs a new roof, a new kitchen, all new flooring, two new bathrooms and the floor has dropped in the middle so I am guessing a structural engineer will need to come out and fix that.
So at $109K maybe this would work because it is going to require at least that much more to make it livable, so the bidding starts, my buyers said they did not want to go over $115K, I figured we did not have a snowballs chance, but the experience for them and myself was going to be good, and I do work for my buyers.
The winning, or should I say the highest bid was at $141K and then the buyer needed to pay an additional fee of 5%, well guess what, the home did not hit the minimum bid requirements as set by the seller, lots of people wasting a lot of time only to find out that we were not even at the minimum. Maybe the bidding should start at the minimum, seems like a no-brainer to me, at least the parties bidding would know if they are going to get the home after all the research they have done to put a value on the property and time they have spent bidding on it.
Home auction number two, the home is listed at $140K and does not need a lot of work, maybe new carpeting and a stove, everything else seems to be fine and in my estimation it would be worth about $215K with those features added. The auction was set to end today at 1:00PM MST, so said the auction site. My clients have instructed me how much to bid, the first bid goes in at 10:00 this morning and then says it will jump at $7500 increments, knocks my buyers out right away. At 5 minutes to 1:00 there were no other bidders and my buyer calls and says make a bid we have just a few seconds, I open the auction site back up and mine says I have ten minutes to bid and the price is now $150K, it is now after 1:00 and the price keeps climbing and the clock keeps resetting.
I figured it out, and it makes sense, as long as someone is bidding, they will give everyone else a chance to beat it to up the price for the seller, it eventually went for $162.5K, but here is the kicker, this is a short sale, a bank approved short sale, if the bank decides that they have not met the minimum, does the process start all over? Seems to be a good play by the banks that have surplus inventory, at least in Colorado if they want to unload some homes and get top dollar, they should look into this type of sale.
Personally I hope I never see another, but if I was to sell bank owned, I would do this all day long for them.
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