Foreclosure Auction Draws Eager Crowd

In rapid-fire speech that resembled a horse-race announcer’s, an auctioneer introduced the first of the day’s 375 properties: a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Roselle, N.J., with an estimated value of $565,000 and a starting bid of $129,000. (Final sale price: $245,000.)


On the floor, four men called the bids, screaming, blowing whistles, thrusting their arms into the air and using their fingers to signal how much more was being offered over the last bid.

“One man’s misery is another man’s fortune,” the saying goes, and perhaps nowhere was it more true than at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Sunday, where a mob of potential buyers convened for an auction of foreclosed homes, a fast-paced and somewhat unusual happening in a place more used to trade shows and corporate events. Some 1,400 people were there, a crowd twice as large as the one last year, when the California-based Real Estate Disposition Corporation held its first foreclosure auction in the city, in a conference room at a Midtown hotel. But there were not nearly as many foreclosed houses then as there are now, said the corporation’s chairman, Robert Friedman. “The economy is much more severe these days,” Mr. Friedman added. “We’re seeing more foreclosures than any other time in the 19 years we’ve been in business, and we have auctions almost every day all across the country, sometimes more than one auction a day.”

The auction’s rules were simple. Buyers were required to pay 5 percent of a house’s sale price on the spot, so the bidders had to come with a $5,000 cashier’s check and the ability to cover the remaining balance of a down payment with cash or a personal check. The rest of the sale could be financed; mortgage specialists were posted at desks behind the stage.
The properties included a weathered two-family home in Jamaica, Queens, offered for $500 and sold for $125,000; and a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Hampton Bays, on Long Island, offered for $89,000 and sold for $185,000. The corporation adds a 5 percent fee to the final price of each house. Beth Kaplan Bongar, 54, a writer and performer who also works as a real estate agent, bought the Hampton Bays house with part of the money she received in the sale of a loft in TriBeCa that she had owned for 30 years, she said. Ms. Bongar said that she visited the house on Saturday. She noted that it had a fenced-in front yard, where her two dogs could run free, and that outside of windows that had to be replaced, it did not require substantial repair work.