Island to be Sold via Absolute Auction June 4 - June 7

               Fort Myers, Fla. –  (May 10, 2012) — For those who have dreamed of owning their own private island in Florida, it’s possible to get your wish, and at a fraction of what you’d think it might cost. 

                Fisher Auction Co. is preparing to host an online-only, absolute auction June 4-7 for a 1.4 acre private island situated on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, Fla. 

                The picturesque island is currently zoned single-family residential and could accommodate a single-family estate, complete with docks.  However, the property could qualify for a small B & B, provided it receives the proper variances from the Lee County Commission. 

                The private island features deep-water access to both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean along the 67-mile Caloosahatchee River.  The river and its tributaries comprise the most recent leg of the Great Calusa Blueway and offer an abundance of opportunities for those seeking to kayak and canoe.  The river also is home to some of the best Tarpon fishing available anywhere.

                   The absolute auction, which means the island will be sold to the highest bidder with no reserve, will be held online from June 4-7.  To register and for instructions on how to participate in the auction, visit www.fisherauction.com.  Bidders must be pre-qualified.     

                “It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when a private island is sold via absolute auction,” said Lamar Fisher, President and CEO of Fisher Auction Company.  “Given its location and 360 degree riverfront views, we feel this property will draw significant attention from prospective buyers from around the country.”

                Fisher Auction Company has previously handled numerous high-profile auctions including managing the largest online-only auction in U.S. history which featured more than 2,000 parcels of land.

Oceanfront Hotel for Auction on June 8th at 11am, onsite

Seaspray Beach Resort located in Palm Beach Shores, Florida is scheduled to be auctioned on June 8^th, 2012 @ 11am, on the hotel premises.

 PALM BEACH SHORES, FL – The upswing has arrived and oceanfront real estate in South Florida seems to be the item on everyone’s wish list. The seller for this oceanfront hotel, the Seaspray Beach Resort, has decided to auction the property on June 8^th and has engaged Fisher Auction Company to do the job. With wealthy foreign and domestic buyers rapidly depleting available inventory at record high prices, oceanfront real estate has become the hottest ticket in town. This influx of capital has oceanfront hotels experiencing a similar phenomenon with record high occupancy and rates. Investors, hoteliers and developers are scouring the coast for ocean front real estate but are coming up short. There are simply too few available premier sites to meet the growing demand.

 Regarded as one of the best kept secrets in Florida, the pristine Town of Palm Beach Shores is surrounded by water on three sides and sits nestled between the world-famous Town of Palm Beach and the exclusive Singer Island, home to the new Ritz-Carlton Residences. Palm Beach Shores is also the home of the Seaspray Inn Beach Resort, a fully operating, 51-room hotel, located at 123 South Ocean Avenue, with breathtaking vistas of the Atlantic Ocean.

 As Palm Beach Shores’ only oceanfront hotel, the Seaspray Beach Resort sits on over half an acre of premier oceanfront land and is just steps away from the Marriot Vacation Club’s Timeshare Resort and ST Residential’s ultra luxury condominium, Dolcevita.  

Buyers can choose to make use of the 50 existing hotel suites or instead, may opt to capitalize on the already approved zoning for approximately 50,000 square feet of residential condominium units. These approvals allow buyers to build up to 27 residential units in a structure as high as six stories without the necessity of obtaining any variances.

Lamar P. Fisher, President and CEO of Fisher Auction Company is leading the sale and marketing effort for this unique opportunity “Even we were surprised by the tremendous interest of hoteliers and developers for this property who have heard from word of mouth about the upcoming auction,” Fisher said.

“Renaissance of Pompano Beach II Condominium

SOLD via Auction,

Oceanfront Condo located in the Renaissance II Sold via Auction

April 14, 2012 @ 2pm – Realized Price: $308,000!

Scheduled to close in 30 days. Lamar Fisher, CEO of Fisher Auction Company was presiding auctioneer. Great turnout.

Auction of Single Family Home in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida

Single Family Home located at 4171 NW 45 Street, Lauderdale Lakes, Florida

Property sold via auction on Saturday, April 14th at 11am. Property to be Sold at or above $20,000 per the City of Lauderdale Lakes. Lamar Fisher, CEO of Fisher Auction Company was presiding auctioneer and attained a total contract price via auction of $97,900!

Auction was well attended by over 100 people, over 50 registered bidders!

Scheduled to close in 30 days.

As marketing began for this high profile auction - we were able to submit to Bankruptcy Court an acceptable offer for all parties.

Auction is scheduled for Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 11am, onsite.

This is a 28,977+/- SF 2-story multi-tenant office building – look to our upcoming auction section for more information

Both retired, they put their homes on the market two years ago to downsize their lives, buying condos on Hollywood Beach.

But the homes never sold. Now, unimpressed with the traditional luxury real estate market, the brothers are putting their homes on the auction block.

The homes, at 401 Ocean Blvd. and 229 Ocean Blvd. in Golden Beach, will hit the block on Thursday, Nov. 10 as part of an absolute auction. This auction carries a few caveats, said Lamar Fisher, president/CEO of Pompano Beach-based Fisher Auction Co    Fisher Auction Co Latest from The Business Journals Luxury homes hitting auction block as market recoversGolden Beach oceanfront estates to hit auction blockRothstein suits, sofas, shoes raise 2,000 Follow this company . The property will sell to the highest bidder – with no reserves and no minimums, he said.

“It goes from zero on up,” he said.

The sellers are among the first owners of ultra-luxury mansions to use the absolute auction method of selling a mansion in South Florida. These will be the highest-valued homes sold via absolute auction in Florida, according to marketing materials. It’s a trend is catching on nationwide. In fact, Bob Fox learned of absolute auctions reading an article about Cher selling her Hawaii home this way, he said.

Prequalified prospective bidders must submit $500,000 to place in escrow. They then can order their own inspections, but the homes are being sold “as is, where is and no contingencies,” Fisher said. The auction will be held at 401 Ocean Blvd. Bidders can bid in person, online or by phone. Winners must pay 10 percent of the purchase price at the auction, which can include the escrow deposit, he said. Closing must come in 30 days. …

Andrew Osinski felt the time had come to say goodbye to the waterfront home in Darien, Conn., that he had owned since 1994. His wife died eight years ago and his four children are grown up. So Osinski, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers, listed the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom property on Long Island Sound, which he bought for $1.52 million and then rebuilt, in May 2010 for $12.5 million. “After I listed the house last year, it quickly became stale,” says the 67-year-old former Wall Streeter. “I’ve been a trader all my life. There’s nothing worse than sitting on a stale position.”

To unload the property, Osinki turned to New York-based Concierge Auctions. The home, on which Osinki had a $5 million loan, eventually sold at auction for $8 million in June—at the low end of the range set by the company. “The market has changed,” Osinki says. “I asked too much, as we all do. I hung on for a long time. But this is it. It’s time to move on.”

Real estate auctions, long used in the sale of foreclosed properties, are becoming more popular among wealthy homeowners to drum up interest for mansions that have languished on the market. In exchange for a quicker sale, many sellers are accepting price cuts of 50 percent or more. Stacy Kirk Reich, president of Grand Estates Auction, based in Charlotte, says only about 12 percent of the auctions it runs are the result of financial distress. “Sellers will come to us for various reasons; maybe the death of a loved one or a divorce, but most frequently because they are reallocating wealth to other locations,” says Kirk Reich. Her company, which specializes in auctions of properties valued at $1.5 million to $10 million, gets an average of 276 inquiries per listing and 16 bidders per auction.

Homeowners are seeking new methods for selling their properties as the U.S. economy shows signs of sputtering and property prices show few indications of trending upward. The S&P/Case-Shiller Indices, a gauge of home prices in 20 U.S. cities, fell 4.5 percent in June from a year earlier.

The number of sales at Premiere Estates Auction, which specializes in luxury properties, rose 30 percent last year, says Anthony Fitzgerald, a broker with the Manhattan Beach (Calif.) company. “The actual dollar amount of homes auctioned off has also increased by about that much,” he adds.

Premiere Estates has been tapped to sell the beach property owned by William Chadwick, a managing director at investment bank Chadwick Saylor. The home sits on “Billionaire Beach,” a stretch of Malibu where Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer of DreamWorks Animation SKG, and Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, also have homes. At an open house in early August, about a dozen people at a time toured the 10,500-square-foot, 9½-bathroom estate, which has five fireplaces, an ocean-view gym, a home theater outfitted with leather recliners, and a 75-foot lap pool.

The minimum bid on the Chadwick property is set at $22 million. With an original listing price of $65 million in 2008, it is the highest-priced home ever to go to auction, says Fitzgerald. Chadwick did not respond to a voicemail left at his office.

While auctions usually result in a sale, they can bring about hefty price reductions from the original listing prices. Most auctions at Grand Estates have fetched between 80 percent and 120 percent of the tax value of properties sold during the past 18 months. However, tax values are often well below the prices real estate sold for during the peak years of 2005 to 2007. Jack Gerlach, who sold his Malibu home in an auction that was conducted by Premiere Estates last year after it had been sitting on the market since 2008, got $2.6 million for it—less than half the original listing price of $5.5 million. “During those two years my house was on the market, I was, in a way, at a standstill,” he says. “To use the auction process was a decision to move forward.”

Gerlach, 32, a residential real estate developer, is in the process of building a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean home in Malibu for his wife and himself. To move ahead with the “dream project,” which he’s planned for six years, as well as two investment properties he is developing in the Hollywood Hills, he wanted to unload his loft-style house, which has floor-to-ceiling windows.

His loans on the property—which he bought for almost $1 million and spent $600,000 to upgrade with features such as white marble imported from Greece—were “significantly below” the value of the house, Gerlach says. So he decided to gamble on an auction sale. “Auctions draw in a huge amount of people,” says Gerlach. “You always have that dream that two people will walk in” and “battle each other to the top.”

The bottom line: Tired of waiting out the market, estate owners are putting their homes up for auction, even it if means accepting a 50 percent discount.

With Hui-yong Yu and Kathleen M. Howley

Brandt is a reporter for Bloomberg News.