One year ago today: July 15, 2014, on the writer’s club.
Five years ago today: July 15, 2010, an attempt at humor.
Six years ago today: July 15, 2009, on purple vegetables.
MORNING
The first stage of analysis is to find out what went wrong. Today, you get mostly my thoughts on that, but consider it money saved if you ever try the same. This is for those prepared to read and learn by our mistakes. Right off the bat, don’t rely on any instructions from the Internet. There are too many experts and you are not likely to pick the right one. Phone the courthouse, office of the clerk, and find out what they accept as payment. I have yet to see a real estate auction ad that tells you the number to call—yet how unlikely is that situation if they are sincerely interested in selling anything?
Our information said cash only. But when we arrived, it was cashier’s check only. It is unlikely the clerk knows where you can get one, but continue. You will probably need more than one. We almost missed the auction in the hour it took us to find a place who would sell us a cashier’s check. Now the second catch. You must show the court clerk a cashier’s check for 5% of the maximum price you intent to bid. Got that? If you intend to bid $10,000 you must show her a cashier’s check for $500. It gets worse.
Now, she only looks at the cashier’s check, she does not take it. Only then, are you allowed to use that cashier’s check to bid on only the one property whose cash number she records. If there were five houses on auction, you would have to show five separate cashier’s checks, one for each property. I know, this sucks, since the moment you are unsuccessful on one bid, that deal is over and you should be able to apply that unspent money on the next lot.
But you can’t. What’s that smell? It smells like damp, dirty bank, I’d say. This is the first hurdle you must overcome, but clearly you have to come up with 5% of not just one bid, but a lump sum amounting to 5% of every property you intend to bid on that day. Sneaky, innit? This is why you always buy your cashier’s checks from a place that will redeem them. Some institutions, like credit unions, will not buy back their own cashier’s checks.
Now pay attention. If you are the successful bidder, at that time the clerk takes the cashier’s check. You have until the end of the court’s open hours to come up with the 95% of the remaining balance. This must also be a cashier’s check. These cost between $5 and $35 each, but obviously you will want a bank nearby enough that you can redeem your unused checks right away. I do not know if the court will accept a bunch of smaller checks, I think they want one check for the full amount of the balance.
NOON
That was hurdle number one. Next, you proceed into the hallway for the “auction”. By this time, you will undoubtedly notice there is at least one person there besides yourself. He looks and acts like a lawyer or city banker. He’s carry a stack of papers clipped into files. (I quickly noticed it was identical to the file I had collected on the one property we had chosen.) He knows the clerks and others around on a first name basis. This is the bank shill who will be bidding against you.
On each of those papers, there is a number. That number is the amount he is “authorized” to bid on the property. So, you are not going to get that property unless you are prepared to bid higher than that number. Stay with me here, the property we had chosen said the bidding started at $100. That is bullshit. The starting bid is the number on that paper, which was, in this instance, $78,600. I have since spent two hours thinking about that.
That’s hurdle number two. The reserve bid quoted in the advertising. If the bank knows of the existence of this second, larger number, they should not be stating the lower number as the starting point. Doing so is a scam because it is misleading and outright false advertising.
Back to the $100. It is properly called an “administration fee”. Not the starting bid. We noticed the first thing before any bidding is allowed is somebody asks if whoever is in charge will waive this fee. They seem to do so every time. (Yes, I know, so why do they even bother?) But one thing the $100 is NOT is any starting bid. That is a lie of magnificent proportion. Yet everyone on the inside seems to be okay with that lie.
NIGHT
I’m looking for patterns, not fault or wrong-doing. I don’t need to be told it is useless to try to beat the house auction people at their own game. They may be unrepentant liars, but they have years of practice at it. When you are up against an immovable object, you don’t rush it headlong. That’s my style, to find a chink in the armor. And here is what I’ve come up with.
It is evident both the banks and the courthouse have some interest in preserving the façade that there is an auction taking place. Plainly to have a bank representative present at a bank auction is automatically a conflict of interest situation. It is very discouraging to know you cannot possibly outbid these shills, yet this contradicts the premise of an auction, where a seller would naturally want as many bidders as possible.
Hence, I concluded that is where to concentrate my investigation. Within the hour, I spotted the pattern. Remember, I am an expert pattern-matcher, but that does not extend to being able to explain why the pattern exists. My thinking is that the bank must have something to gain by placing such high reserve values on the properties while not indicating to the public what is going on. Ah, but didn’t I detect the same pattern in the behavior of the court clerk people? There is something there that I can’t quite put my finger on.
But I don’t have to know the reasons. Historically, I need only find the pattern. And I may be on to something. What is the natural reaction to knowing you cannot possibly bid enough to win? You quit bidding. You walk away. Aha, that is what they must want you to do. They want you to not bid because you cannot win. That was the thrust from every direction on these bank auction affairs from the word go. Now I see it. That shill who got us to walk away got the remaining five houses for $500 total.
Think about it. He must have some incentive to want you to not even bid and this is done by convincing you that you cannot win. Hmmm. Next time, we will bid and force him to pay twenty times as much for each property, just to see how the system reacts. Is he working commission? It could be something as simple as he has some place else to be that day. We do not know if we are on the right track, but at this point we don’t need to be.
We will use the court’s own 5% rule to leverage our bids to force the shill to always have to bid more in total that the one house we are interested in. I know they have figured out that we are not seeking to cooperate with them. For that matter, they acted a touch incredulous that we were not the least interested in their help or advice. We now know that shill has to buy all the houses at a given auction. We only want one.
We also intend to drag the bidding out, gauging for reaction. We outbid the shill by a trivial amount at a time to see if he gets impatient and throws in a huge bid, then we back off. Why? Because we also noticed both the court and the shill acted like the auction was a foregone conclusion and they wanted it over with asap.
The next logical phase is to demand proof that these banks are actually paying out that money and not just making a bookkeeping entry. However, at this point, I must leave this topic so as not to give away our more advanced strategy for dealing with these imposters and crooks. We already know they do not handle opposition very well and I know they are too large to react fast. And that two organized people showing up with real money took them by surprise. That much we know.
Trivia. Did you know that 11,000 men leave America each day to escape the wage slavery imposed upon them child-support laws? I agree, the children need support, but the financial part should not be so one-sided. Both parents should suffer the cost, not just one. But the real goat appears to be when the woman starts living with her new boyfriend. That’s the point where the men are leaving. Usually for England and Australia, who don’t have such one-sided laws.
ADDENDUM
Wow, the support for what we are planning has been 100% so far. Can these auctions be that unpopular in the public eye? Nobody in our crowd is old enough to recall the Depression, so if these auctions have a bad name, well, go figure. I don’t intend to, but yes, it would be fascinating to form a group that could force the final bids into the millions, just to see what happens.
I mean, the cost of this trip was just $94 inclusive, so the fun-factor overrides any of that. In a month, we will be tough customers. I don’t know if our plan will strike a nerve, but we just keep trying until we develop a strategy that works. I know that sounds lofty, but folks, these are not real auctions and you are not going to get anything worthwhile unless you make a plan.
Last Laugh
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