Tax Foreclosure Auction

I went to the King County tax foreclosure auction today. Bought nothing. I did bid on one property, though, but was outbid past what we had decided was our limit.

Over the last few weeks, my list of potential properties has been whittled down as the owners paid off their back property taxes. It's been like watching a disaster movie. You never know which of these characters will be the next to die!

I had something like twenty properties (out of two hundred listed) that looked worth bidding on. And then Capitol Hill gets wiped out, and then Newcastle dies, and then Park Orchard and Pipe Lake and Des Moines! Oh, the carnage!

At the beginning of the last act of the movie (this morning), we have five characters left. Three quickly get slaughtered by some torrential flood (of last-minute payoffs): Broadview, Phinney Ridge, and Fauntleroy all go quick. And then there were two: Thorndyke and Skyway. And Skyway doesn't look too healthy.

In fact, maybe Skyway isn't good enough to bid on. Nope, too many problems and unanswered questions. So that just leaves Thorndyke, the first property of the auction.

Bidding starts low, at the $11,000 or so that the county is owed, but quickly jumps up to $75,000. In leaps of $5,000, the bidding progresses. At $130,000, it stalls. One of the two bidders has pulled out. I raise my hand and call out "135!" The other man bumps it up to 140, I take 145, he claims $150,000, which was our limit. I shake my head "no."

In the front row, Santa Claus bids $155,000. The man I'd been bidding against goes to $160,000. "Going once, going twice, . . . sold."

I stuck around for another hour or so, still thinking about bidding on the Skyway property. The guy who'd bought the Thorndyke house bid on some other land, too, so who knows how much he'd have been willing to go up on that one.

A couple people bid on anything cheap, even if it was useless. One woman paid $1,173 for a few square yards of beach in Ballard and then $1,202 for a 1,600-square-foot wedge in Lea Hill. There were no other bids on those. One man paid $1,600 for land completely submerged beneath Steel Lake, then $2,000 for a 14' by 2.1' rectangle (yes, I typed that correctly) in the middle of a block in Greenwood, and then $2,200 for another tiny strip of land near Seward Park. He had a wad of cash. He probably bought a few more parcels after I left.

What could these people possibly be thinking?