Sheila and Alex Shapiro, who have six grown children, hurl enough endearments around to last many couples the length of their marriage. But when it comes to the problems of trying to sell their home–a contemporary white mansion on the top of a mountain in Pomona, Calif.–he becomes choked up and she becomes unnaturally quiet.
To build it in 1987, Shapiro said, he basically “blew off the top of the mountain” after buying 11 lots in the subdivision.
The 22,000-square-foot house on 13 acres has turned out to be a tough sell at an asking price of $5.5 million. In the three years it has been on the market, said Shapiro, a builder, it attracted at least one suspected con man and one suspected con woman, along with lots of lookers. And four deals have fallen through.
So what do you do with a house like that?
“We decided to auction it off,” said the 57-year-old Sheila Shapiro, who looks at least a decade younger. “Everything’s packed; I want to start traveling.”
The Shapiro house, called Jewel in the Sky, is one of seven gigantic structures called “trophy homes” by their auctioneers, who next week are holding what is believed to be the first and largest sale of such individually owned (vs. bank-owned) homes in the Northeast. The auctioneers, Sheldon Good & Co., based in Chicago, place the total value of the seven houses and two pieces of land at $23 million.
The other houses include a $2.8 million, 13-room contemporary with a 40-foot indoor lap pool overlooking Cold Spring Harbor in Lloyd Harbor, Long Island (suggested opening bid: $700,000); an “architecturally striking” waterfront chateau with a 50-foot-long kitchen and a 500-bottle wine cellar in Mill Neck, Long Island (opening bid: $700,000) and an older waterfront mansion with a 50-foot pier and a 90-foot-long marble gallery, previously on the market for $2 million, in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island (suggested opening bid: $700,000).
The auction on Tuesday will also feature the Tudor City penthouse, in New York City, used in the Woody Allen movie “Manhattan Murder Mystery.” An apartment with midtown views from every window, it was once rented by Charlton Heston and is now rented to tenants who are paying $12,000 a month (suggested opening bid: $600,000).
And in New Jersey, on Wood Duck Pond in Far Hills, the auctioneers will try to sell a 12-room “French Normandy mansion” on 10 acres, right next to the estate owned by King Hassan of Morocco. Auctioneers suggest a first bid on the house, once priced at $3.2 million, in the neighborhood of $800,000.
For those who want a bigger place, there is the 23-room, 10-fireplace manor house built in Montclair, N.J., from 1906 to 1909 by State Sen. Edmund Osborn (opening bid: $795,000). The 3,100-square-foot carriage house and an adjacent one-acre lot are being sold separately, with opening bids of $245,000 and $195,000, respectively.
Michael Fine, a senior vice president at the auction house, said the suggested opening bids were just that–suggested. While properties most often sell for above the opening bids, they do, sometimes, sell for those amounts.
But Fine confirmed that there were also reserves on most of the properties–something auctioneers don’t like to talk about. A reserve is a secret figure, set by the owner; the auctioneer has orders not to sell the property below that figure.
“Of the houses we offer for sale, we sell 70 percent of them before, during or after the sale,” the auctioneer said, adding that virtually 100 percent that “sell” in the auction go on to close.
Prospective bidders must buy what is called a “bid package,” which, for $35, includes detailed descriptions of every room in the house, floor plans, maps, a copy of the contract to show lawyers, a structural-inspection report by an independent firm, and other documentation. The houses are open by appointment for inspections.
Bidders must bring certified checks for about 10 percent of each property’s suggested opening bid, Fine said. After the auction, the seller has two days to accept or reject the winning bid; once he has handed in his certified check, Fine said, it is difficult for the bidder to get out of the deal without forfeiting the deposit.
For Shemi Rokeach, head of Global Equities, the New York City real estate investment firm that owns the Charlton Heston penthouse, as it is called, an auction was clearly the way to go.
Like all the houses except one, the penthouse had been on the market and had not sold. (Fine, however, said that it had not been offered since its recent, major renovation.)
“About a year ago, we had another fabulous penthouse at Alwyn Court,” Rokeach said, referring to the apartment building at 180 W. 58th St. “I tried Christie’s, then Brown Harris Stevens, then Douglas Elliman, but it wasn’t moving. So I auctioned it. We were originally asking $900,000; we reserved it at $800,000. We got $972,000. It shows how an auction can work.”
But there is a certain peril to the system.
“What happens if it doesn’t sell, if it doesn’t fetch the reserve?” asked Kay Coughlin, founder and head of Christie’s Great Estates, a brokerage that features multimillion-dollar estates. “Then nobody wants it. They think if it doesn’t even sell at auction, there must be something terribly wrong.” There is often a public perception, she said, that because the property is being auctioned, “it’s a fire sale–you can get a steal.”
If that perception can be overcome, she said, auctions can be a good idea, especially for a unique, hard-to-sell property.
Last year, she said, she had planned an auction for Berry Hill Farm, a magnificent and historically significant estate in South Boston, Va., that happened to be in a slightly-less-than-prime location. (“If it had been in Middleburg,” Coughlin said, “it would have sold for three times more.”) But her plan was thwarted, when the house was sold, to be used as a corporate retreat, shortly before the auction.
