Buying a property at Auction online. Auction.com frustrations
Here is the background behind my predicament, as I said in the description, I have been trying to purchase an REO property for the past 3 weeks on Auction.com. I am the only actual person bidding on this property every week but every time I submit a bid, the automated counter bid feature activates and I am outbid yet again. How the feature on the site works is that the seller of the property places a "Reserve" price, which is the minimum price that they say they will accept the purchase at. Every time a bid comes in below the reserve price the seller counter bid activates and the bidder is outbid by the site itself, which does the counterbidding on behalf of the seller. While I understand that the seller wants to get an acceptable price for their property, my main gripe is that the seller has configured it so that every bid must go up by increments of 10,000 up to a certain point and then 5,000 after that. So if I submit a bid for 30,000, the counter bid feature activates and automatically bids for 40,000. My only hope to get back into the running at that point is to submit a bid for 50,000. Towards the end of the auction, in the final 15 seconds usually, the counter bidding feature activates again so that the seller bids against themselves again to lengthen the auction by another 2 minutes and raise the price by another 5 or 10 thousand. This usually happens about 2 or 3 times every auction. Apparently, the counter bid feature only goes up to until the reserve price is met but every time that the auction ends, the price that the automated counter bidding system has run it up to is far beyond what I am comfortable paying for the property and it still says that the "Reserve price is not met yet". The intent for this property is to be a flip and I am not even allowed to have interior access even though it is not currently occupied so I cannot even guess what my potential costs to flip would be. Is there a solution here? Or do I have to just hope that the real estate gods smile down upon me one day and have the seller accept my bid? Any and all advice would be appreciated.
-Carlos