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Bidding Starts at a Buck: 3 Luxury Homes Up for Auction With No Reserve

When you hear that a gorgeous luxury home is up for auction with “no reserve” (no minimum bid), you can’t help but fantasize. It’s the same dream you have when the Powerball jackpot climbs into the hundreds of millions. But your chances of winning the lottery are actually better than scoring a luxury home for a single buck.

It’s easy to wonder why the multimillionaire homeowners would risk their properties selling for ridiculously low prices.

“We find that doesn’t happen,” says Laura Brady, founder and president of Concierge Auctions, which sells luxe properties to well-heeled bidders up to 10 times a month. She explains that buyers who prefer to go the auction route want to market their properties for a limited amount of time and know exactly when they will sell. It offers sellers a sense of finality.

A no-reserve auction also helps a property “find its true value,” according to Brady. Some luxury homes just don’t adhere to the comp model of pricing. “You can’t assess one of these properties going by what the other houses in the neighborhood have recently sold for, because these are one of a kind,” she says. When you set a starting bid in the millions, “you’re actually putting a cap on it,” she explains, because bidders think a high opening bid is the most the property is worth, and won’t bid more.

Then there are the buyers who take forever to decide, and play the waiting game to see if the price will go down. An auction jolts them into opening their wallets.

What kinds of unique, multimillion-dollar properties dare to go on the block with no reserve? Take a look at these three beauties.

732 Hall Hill Rd, Somers, CT

Monticello-Somers is a brick-for-brick replica of Thomas Jefferson’s 18th-century home and was built by S. Prestley Blake, co-founder of the popular Friendly’s restaurant chain. The residence sits on a 9.27-acre wooded lot and measures nearly 10,000 square feet. It has seven fireplaces, five bedrooms, five bathrooms, and four half-baths. There are numerous horse trails and three different places to land your helicopter. Blake invested $8 million in the place, but it’s currently on the market $4.9 million.

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101 Pascal Ln, Austin, TX

Start bidding now! This is the family compound of millionaire Ross Garber—wine aficionado, race car enthusiast, tech entrepreneur, and co-founder of Vignette, which sold in 2009 for $310 million. Now he’s selling his estate, which has been valued at $16.9 million. It comes with a 2,400-bottle underground wine cellar, a tennis court, a gym, two outdoor grilling stations, a 50-foot infinity pool, a pool house, and a 10-car, air-conditioned garage. This nine-bedroom, 14,000-square-foot house sits on 3.5 acres, surrounded by 400 acres of protected canyon land.

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233 Carter Rd, Princeton, NJ

Listed for $2.5 million, this 6,000-square-foot mansion in an Ivy League city could turn out to be a bargain for a savvy bidder. Colonial on the outside, modern and luxurious on the inside, it features three fireplaces, a spacious master suite, and four bedrooms. There’s also a guest barn with two en suite bedrooms, soaring ceilings, and a stone fireplace. It sits on a wooded lot that measures over 5 acres, and is only an hour drive from Philadelphia, and one and a half hours from New York City.

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