Prices Slashed: Luxury Mansions on Sale

In today's fragile real estate market, you can grab a ritzy home on the cheap.

ByABC News
May 2, 2008, 1:39 PM

May 7, 2008— -- Have you ever wanted to live in the lap of luxury but didn't think you could afford to do so?

Well now might be the perfect time to buy your very own mansion marked down at auction.

With the real estate market struggling to stay afloat, more and more affluent sellers are turning to auctioneers to sell off their homes. And we aren't just talking about people who are facing foreclosure.

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"Most of the people who have high-end homes, they buy their antiques thorough auction, they buy their airplanes through auction, they buy their classic cars through auction. So they are used to that venue of sale and they don't look at it as a distressed type of thing," said Daniel DeCaro, whose Florida auction company has seen a spike in business.

Homes at auction are typically purchased "as is." So if that water heater is broken or if you find termites: too bad. Deals close within 30 days and the purchase price, plus a fee to the auctioneer, is paid in full.

For the buyer, the advantage is the ability to name their own price.

For instance, take a 6,300-square-foot home in Scottsdale, Ariz. being sold by Eric Nelson Auctioneering, of Las Vegas.

It was originally listed for $3.2 million. Now the opening bid for the 4-bedroom, 5-bathroom house will be $1.5 million. Another home in the same area was originally listed for $1.85 million and now carries an opening bid of $800,000.

The one holdout from the auction market, DeCaro said, were new home builders.

"They felt as though it would taint them," he said, adding "That stigma is now gone."

Even so, the bargains people find on million-dollar homes can sometimes come as a result of a foreclosure.

In normal market conditions, it's "very, very rare" for luxury properties to face foreclosure, said Rick Sharga, the vice president of marketing for the California-based research firm RealtyTrac.

Buyer Beware

If you plan to buy a home at auction, beware. There are several pitfalls.

The biggest problem is often a very short window from the time a property is listed for sale to when it's auctioned. That means that potential buyers have little opportunity to investigate what they are bidding on.