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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (67879)	7/15/1999 5:02:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164685

Sold to the highest online bidder -- your new home By Michelle V. Rafter LOS ANGELES, July 14 (Reuters) -- Maybe you'd consider buying a Beanie Baby collection or a laptop computer through an online auction. But would you buy a house? For Jeff and Fafie Moore, it's not a rhetorical question. The Moores are broker/owners of Realty Executives (www.realtyexecutives.com), a Las Vegas residential real-estate company. At high noon on Tuesday, they began a two-day online auction on behalf of the owners of 319 houses, condos, trailer homes and undeveloped pieces of property in and around Sin City. Running the auction for Realty Executives is Homebid.com (www.homebid.com), a Scottsdale, Ariz., company that is quite possibly the first business ever devoted to sell new and existing homes through auctions over the Internet. The Las Vegas home sale is the latest of three test auctions Homebid.com has run since the beginning of the year to gauge consumer interest. It is also the largest online auction Homebid.com has run so far, with more than twice the number of properties listed for sale in prior pilots in Phoenix in June, and Hartford, Conn., in January. In an increasing wired world, where everything else is being bought and sold through online auctions, why not houses, the biggest purchase most people make in their lives? It makes sense to Kevin Hickey, who left an executive post at an enterprise computing company last year to become chief executive at Homebid.com. His goal: to do for residential real estate what eBay (www.ebay.com) did for selling collectibles. "This industry will see some dramatic changes over the next 12 months," Hickey said. "It's evolve or dissolve." Gregg Larson, a well-known real-estate consultant, thought so highly of Homebid.com he joined the company. As head of business development, Larson will direct Homebid.com's efforts to put its online real-estate auctions on Web portals, Web sites of major real-estate franchises and the growing contingent of online home-listing sites such as Realtor.com (www.realtor.com), HomeSeekers.com (www.homeseekers.com) and Microsoft's<MSFT.O> > HomeAdvisor (www.homeadvisor.com). "It was an opportunity I couldn't refuse," Larson said. Venture capitalists, including Chase Capital Partners, have poured $25 million into Homebid.com. The privately held company, formerly known as Latham Group, was a long-time residential real-estate auctioneer that held sales in hotel ballrooms and over satellite TV before chucking it all to focus on the Web and changing its name. Homebid.com plans to use the funds to promote auctions of residential real estate, as well as foreclosed, repossessed and government-owned properties, and to expand internationally. But some observers remain skeptical. Online auctions might make sense for people who snap up bank repos as investments. "But how can you expect people to set a price for a house in an auction when they don't even know how to set a price for an airline ticket?" said James Punishill, an analyst with Forrester Research (www.forrester.com), the technology researcher. Homebid.com's experience running its online auction in Phoenix bears that out. Of 151 homes listed for sale by three separate real-estate brokers, only 32 were sold, and all but one of those were sold in a 10-day "e-offering" period prior to the opening of the auction where buyers could accept offers made online without going through the bidding process. "People were still anxious about the auction process," Hickey said, "but we sold $6 million in inventory, so we considered it a success." The company had better success in Hartford, selling 136 of 148 properties owned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) over one snowy three-day weekend last winter. Homebid.com is using what it learned to tweak its auction process. As part of that, in Las Vegas, Homebid.com and Realty Executives st...