Chasing The Bidder 

On auction day, an auctioneer has several hats to wear. Chief among them are comic, referee, salesman, and speed-reader of mind-numbingly awful legal documents.

Last week’s foreclosure sale of the Burlington Woods office park showed all those dynamics at work, and then introduced us to a new one: The auctioneer as club bouncer, trying to keep a VIP in a private booth with bottle service until closing time.

The Davis Cos. wound up walking away from the auction with two office buildings, for the bargain-basement price of $33 million. The company had to work for it, though.

The buildings’ seller, GE Capital, initially took back three office buildings, one at a time. Each sale was punctuated by an extended period of legalese-reading, during which onlookers milled about and sweated. The action was less a contest between attendees’ wallets than it was a battle of wills – the best building of the bunch was held until the end, and to reach it, you had to be willing to tramp through a series of suburban parking lots and wait a very long time.

Along the way, the attendees received crumbs of encouragement. Well into the day’s second interminable legal notice, they were told the building was, “The better one, by the way. It’s bigger and better.” More than two hours in, when they reached the third one, they were assured, “This is the best building of the bunch!” The thing was so good, in fact, that GE decided it couldn’t part with it, not jut yet, so they outbid everybody who actually remained on site.

The way these things normally go is, the party ends when the lender puts more money on the table than anyone else. GE had other plans.

But first, the lender had to convince the handful of moneyed bidders that endured three hours of fruitless auctioneering that nothing was over yet. So when a group of Davis Cos. execs went to leave, an auctioneer dashed after them. “Wait!” he pleaded “Wait, Mr. Davis. Don’t leave!”