Coming Soon to LA: Foreclosure Auction Frenzy ... “The Fastest $200,000 We’ve Ever Spent”

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An auction of 100 foreclosed homes in the San Diego area drew 1,200 bidders yesterday. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Emmet Pierce describes a ‘festive,’ ‘raucous’ scene, with rock music blaring and tuxedo-wearing auction house assistants leaping in the air, trying to whip the crowd into a bidding frenzy.

“You don’t have a lot of time to think,” Curtis Friedman, a homeowner who bought a second home in El Centro as an income property, told Pierce. ‘It’s the fastest $200,000 we ever spent. It’s over before you know what happened.”

Robert Friedman, chairman of the Irvine-based auction firm REDC, said the auction was REDC’s largest such event since the housing recession of the mid-1990s. The company wil run a similar event in Los Angeles on May19.

Bottom Line: ‘Hamid Gholam, a real estate agent from Irvine, said he saw reasonable deals but few true bargains. For investors like himself, “I don’t think there’s much money to be made,” he said.