Jeffrey James Johnston, a spotter for the auctioneer, called the bids on foreclosed houses at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Sunday. More Photos > 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.” Outside the Javits Center, some 20 protesters — among them labor leaders, antiwar activists and someone from City Councilman Charles Barron’s office in Brooklyn — were critical of both the auction and the billions of dollars the federal government has devoted to bailing out financial institutions. One protester held a sign that read: “R.E.D.C. made $3 billion last year by auctioning off working people’s homes. Bail out the people — not the corporate predators.” The corporation does not have any role in foreclosing on homes; it is simply hired by banks to sell the foreclosed homes they own at auction, Mr. Friedman said. Last year, it held 300 auctions. This year, it expects to hold about 100 more than that. From a dais that rose before packed rows of aluminum chairs, the company’s vice president, Todd Gladis, greeted the audience with a mix of lament and rallying cry. “Nobody likes the foreclosure crisis that’s going on,” he bellowed into a microphone. “But we believe that everybody here in this room will play a role in turning things around by turning houses into homes.” Then, the auction began. “I pray that God will help me find a place I will like and can afford,” said Letisha Jones, 28, a nurse who lives with her parents and two sisters in East New York, Brooklyn. Ms. Jones said that she planned to spend no more than $100,000 on a home for herself, or maybe a bigger home for her family. She left empty-handed. “Maybe I’ll have better luck next time, now that I know how it works,” she said. The audience was roughly divided into three categories. There were experienced bidders, many of them investors who have made careers of buying, fixing up and selling foreclosed homes for below-market prices — and quick profits. There were the novices, who looked at once lost and awestruck, their eyes darting between the booklet listing the houses that were up for grabs and the screens that showcased them as the bidding went on. Finally, there were the curious, like Ashley Durham and her fiancé, Darnell Smith, who plan to marry in May. “We might come back to an auction after the wedding to see if we can buy a place for us, but for now, we’re just looking,” said Ms. Durham, 25. “And laughing,” Mr. Smith, 32, added. “This is crazy.” 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. “I need a place to call home,” she said. “And in the long run, this will cost me a little more than the storage bin I have down in Jersey, which is costing me $300 a month.”
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Next Article in New York Region (2 of 12) »A version of this article appeared in print on March 9, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.
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