Tossed at San Francisco Real Estate Auction

Who hasn’t seen someone get tossed from a bar, maybe even a baseball game but how about a real estate auction? Yes, we actually witnessed it because unfortunately it happened to us. That's right, on Friday Statewide Real Estate Auctions held an auction out in West Portal.

Here's the video before we got tossed. Click here

The draw here - an opening bid of $449 with a house that we expected to go before between $900 - $950K (the house sold for $935K). The listing and showing agents seemed nice enough answering questions and handling the 50-plus people jammed into the house. When the broker Bodhi Kroll came and asked us what we were doing, we just said that we wanted to show some of the footage on our blog he seemed to get a little defensive. We asked him if we could ask him a few questions about the process of the auction. He said sure but only if we turned off the camera. Have something to hide? We asked him how the reserve price worked? "That's proprietary information" he snapped. We didn't ask him what the reserve amount was just how it worked here at the auction.

We then wandered through some of the house filing some of the chaos. Then, the action starts with Kroll explaining the house rules before the bidding.In mid sentence, he looks at our camera guy. "I thought that I told you I didn't want that camera on." We pointed out that several other people had their iPhones going. That didn't matter to Mr. Broker or that we had a client waiting to bid on the house. He asked us to leave. In the pouring rain. We aren't 60 Minutes. Was he afraid of us stealing his soul or maybe just buyers?

Is that how you hold your auctions in the East Bay? Perhaps he was afraid that someone would copy his idea of doing a real estate auction? He seems like one of the guys who deals in scarcity instead of abundance.

Got transparency?