I went to my first foreclosure sale today - in SC they're conducted by the Master in Equity. There was something that I didn't quite understand. In many of the auctions, the plaintiff (bank) would enter a bit of $2500 - on about 10% of them, someone else would bid on them - at which point the bank would bid in 25k increments until they got to their max bid...or in many cases, the other bidders would drop out before they got there. What I didn't understand, was why weren't there bids on all of them? i.e. - if the bank has an opening bid of $100, on a $300,000 property, were the other investors just assuming that the bank wasn't going to let it go on the cheap? I asked two different people at the auction, but they didn't seem to know either. The big investors were pretty busy, and I didn't want to bother them.
All in all, it was a great experience - very friendly people, only about 40 in attendance for about 50 properties. Only about 6 or 8 of them sold to anyone other than the bank. there was one property that I was interested in for $30,000 - it was probably valued at around $70,000 be needed a lot of work. The bank's opening bid was $68,000. I don't quite understand that one either, I guess I'll keep watching, I assume that one will come back as an REO.
Thoughts?
TIA!