The event featured a tuxedoed auctioneer, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” blasting on the sound system and several hundred people brimming with hope.
It was a giddy atmosphere, if you didn’t think too much about the fact that their high hopes came courtesy of the dashed hopes of others.
This was Sunday morning at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at Chambers Road and East 40th Avenue. The Real Estate Disposition Corp. was auctioning off 67 houses and condos that had been foreclosed on in central Colorado.
Dave Lee, one of the REDC’s senior vice presidents, told me the company has been holding such auctions around the country at a clip of more than 30 a month.
“By year’s end, we’ll have sold $3 billion worth of homes,” he said.
The REDC’s job is to recoup some of the money that lenders lost on loans gone bad. The crowd was there to snap up bargains. Lee, an affable guy in a black suit and sharp tie, was there to prime the pump.
“Most people look their entire lives for that one great opportunity,” he told the audience. “Seize that opportunity.”
Lee reminded auctiongoers, many of them confessed newbies, of the history of market cycles.
“Over the last 100 years, when the real-estate market peaks in a cycle, that peak is always higher than the last peak,” he said.
And lastly: “Let’s not forget, this is the United States of America.”
Then the mayhem — OK, it was more like controlled chaos — started. Participants ranged from the clued-in (I think it’s a smokin’ deal, especially with light rail going through) to the clueless (How do they check your financing?)
Dick and Waydean Hedges drove from Idaho Springs, hoping to buy a house as a rental property. The one they sought was the fourth on the auction block. The house was once valued at $247,700, but the opening bid was $59,000. Amid the auctioneer’s rat-a-tat spiel, the couple landed the house.
“It wound up being a little higher than what we thought we were bidding, which was $115,000,” Dick confessed. “Turned out we bought it for $150,000.”
But they were happy. They used a chunk of 401(k) funds to buy it, figuring in this economy, real estate might prove safer than the stock market.
“This is our first investment property,” Waydean said. “We checked it out, and it doesn’t need too much work. We can rent it out for what we want to get.”
Waydean allowed that buying a house that once was someone else’s dream was a bit discomfiting: “It feels weird to do that.”
The three-bedroom home is in Green Valley Ranch, close enough to Denver International Airport that you can see the jets rise from what was once ranchland. Oakwood Homes built it in 2005, and the house sits on a street filled with nearly identical houses.
I swung by after the auction. The street was as quiet as a churchyard. I rang a few doorbells, but no one seemed to be home.
The red brick house had a maroon door. So help me, a tumbleweed lodged against the sapling in the front yard, which will need resodding.
I don’t know who the owner was, but it’s a decent bet that it was a first-time buyer who rolled the dice on a tricked-out mortgage that came up snake-eyes.
I hope the place works out for the Hedgeses. Someone deserves to be happy with it.
William Porter writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at wporter@denverpost.com.
