Seattle investment sales broker Erik Swanson said he has a pretty straightforward strategy for succeeding in the Ten-X Battle of the Bids competition where players wager on commercial real estate sales prices: Pick properties that are likely to sell, and get to know as much as possible about them.
For Swanson, a senior vice president who specializes in retail properties at Kidder Mathews, his game plan paid off last week as he won the fifth round and took home $100,000. He was focusing on "properties that would have a lot of interest, one that there's a story, a bit of a story behind. And then, secondly, trying to drill down on our realistic value," he said in an interview.
In Battle of the Bids, players place bets each round on the final sale prices of 10 properties to be auctioned on Ten-X, the online commercial real estate exchange owned by CoStar Group, publisher of CoStar News. Ten-X is giving away prizes totaling up to $3 million, including a $1 million grand prize to the player who accumulates the most points in the six-round competition that Ten-X said is the biggest of its kind in commercial real estate.
The sixth and final round of Battle of the Bids this season is underway. Betting closes on Monday, and the round ends Nov. 29.
Swanson said he benefited from his experience as he predicted the price properties would sell for in the Ten-X auction. "I've been doing retail investment sales for 18 years," he said. "So we look at a lot of properties every week and feel like we have a pretty good sense of the market value, typically. So I'm sure that helps."
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Swanson is partners with Mike King, the Kidder Mathews investment sales broker who won the top prize of $1 million last year in the first season of Battle of the Bids. Swanson said while he competes with King when playing Battle of the Bids, it's also a collaborative atmosphere.
"I saw Mike win it last year and kind of understand how he looks at it, and we'd compare notes, of course," Swanson said. "And we didn't bet on the same properties every time, but I'm sure a lot of them were the same."
As for his haul of cash, Swanson, who lives in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds, Washington, with his wife Kristin and their two children, said he has some ideas of how he'll spend it.
"Well, we recently did a home remodel, so some of it will be going into that," he said. "I'm sure as soon as my kids figure out what I won, their Christmas list is probably going to expand, and we're going to throw a little to charity, too."