Irony at its finest: malls are now being sold online

Failing malls are increasingly being sold via online auctions, the Wall Street Journal reports.

For example, online marketplace, Ten-X Commercial, is the venue Ohio mall Midway Mall was sold on for $4.5 million in July. It’s one of 10 sales of shopping malls the marketplace has facilitated this year. Since Tex-X began selling malls in 2012, the company has done 50 sales.

On Ten-X, the mall is marketed for up to two months ahead of the auction; the winning bidder has 24 hours to pay a deposit and one month to finalize the sale.

And they’re not the only one in the game: Real Capital Markets has a similar marketplace set up where they’ve managed 57 mall transactions this year alone. They logged 68 last year.

The preference for using an online marketplace has picked up according to Newmark Knight Frank’s Thomas Dobrowski. “Online auctions for properties have evolved over the past five years. They have become more mainstream,” he told the Journal.

Using the online marketplaces are common among properties that tend to be smaller footprints and usually not among the upper echelon of the retail sector.

[WSJ] — E.K. Hudson