Bid on the City Miami to go live tomorrow


A Bid on the City listing at the Netherland

The Miami site of real estate auction company Bid on the City is set to
go live tomorrow, with its first auction May 17.

The company announced the opening
of its Miami outpost last week
.

Bid on the City, which is an online
real estate trading platform, will begin its Miami foray by auctioning
$12 million in luxury properties each worth over $1 million in an auction that will
be streamed worldwide and held in the company’s showroom in New York’s
Times Square.

Hosting a Miami auction in New York is just part of the
link between the two markets, said Vlad Sapozhnikov, Bid on the City’s
managing director for residential and commercial sales.

“The Miami market and the New York markets are so connected,” he said. “It just made sense for us to expand to Miami; a lot of people in New York have second homes in Miami, and a lot of investors are looking at Miami more and more closely. It just made sense for us.”

Another consideration for the company was the unique proportion of foreign buyers in Miami, he said.

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“This is our philosophy: 30 percent of our traffic comes from overseas,” he said. “A lot of our bidders, a lot of our users are foreigners. A lot of people from foreign countries are interested both in Manhattan and Miami, and that’s one of the major reasons we decided to launch [in Miami], because it has an international appeal.”

Part of the company’s strategy is to find unique, higher-end properties, as opposed to a mass listing service.

Among the properties set for the firm’s first Miami auction is a 3,756-square-foot condo at the Netherlands on South Beach’s Ocean Drive.

“It’s kind of a different concept,” said Todd Nordstrom, a realtor with Keller Williams, who is listing the unit. “If you put something on, say, Realtor.com, or any number of other websites, it’s just there, available. Whenever you have a timeframe, an auction gets people kind of curious because people don’t like to lose something to somebody else.”

The owner of the Netherland South Beach unit going to auction, Tom Donall, said the idea to list the property came from a wine and cheese event hosted for real estate agents.

“They saw the property, and that’s how it came about,” said Donall, who said the property has been on the market for about a year.

According to Sapozhnikov, only brokers are able to list with the site. That is consistent with most of the company’s sites, such as in Westchester and in Russia, but in New York, sellers can list directly.