The second season of Ten-X's Battle of the Bids competition, where players bet on how much properties will sell for at auction, kicks off this week with a larger field and bigger prize pool.

It also has a reigning champion, Mike King, who walked away with a $1 million top prize in the inaugural competition last year. The Kidder Mathews investment sales broker says he'll be back again this year and offered some tips to his challengers (more on that later).

CoStar News will follow the competition this year, keeping tabs on the winners and tracking how the top brokerages perform. Ten-X said it's the largest contest of its kind in the commercial real estate industry.

Battle of the Bids is a six-round competition in which 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 will give away prizes totaling up to $3 million, including a $1 million grand prize to the player who accumulates the most points across the six rounds.

This season there is a mystery prize valued at $100,000 that will be awarded to the overall second-place winner. The finalist prizes also include a $100,000 contribution to the winner’s charity of choice and a $10,000 contribution for the second-place winner.

When the first round of the competition kicks off Friday, Ten-X said it expects to have a larger number of players than the more than 13,000 who participated last year. That's because this year, in addition to CoStar Group clients, anyone who owned or brokered a commercial real estate property in the past three years can play.

"It'll be a much larger pool this year. I think that it'll be interesting to see how it plays out because I was watching every round last year and how many people participated in each round," King said. "They changed the rules this year so that even if you just play in every round, you're eligible for another prize. And so I think they're kind of incentivizing people to play every single round."

King said he's not ready to relinquish his crown.

"I've always been competitive on anything I do, racing, climbing, all sorts of whatever is put in front of me," he said. "I want to try and win."

King described his winning strategy this way:

1. Stick with it, and play every round. "I think there's some people that would skip around, and it's pretty hard to win if you don't play the whole game. And I didn't get into first place until the very last round, and so it was a battle."
2. Bid on property types with which you are familiar. "Retail investments and shopping centers is what we primarily sell. We do a fair amount of distressed real estate and work for special servicers and receivers. So we had used Ten X in the past and sold properties at auction, and so we kind of understood the process." But King said, even he has a weakness: "I can't tell you what a hotel is worth," he said.
3. Research the properties you pick to place bets on.
4. Pay particular attention to a property's cash flow to better estimate its final selling price at auction. "I knew going into the last round I was in third place. And so that very last round, I put a lot of time and effort into researching the properties, looking on CoStar, pulling as much information as I could, and it worked out nicely."

In last year's contest, Marcus & Millichap finished the contest with the most total points accumulated by its brokers at the company level. Kidder Mathews' team of players, fueled by King's win of the grand prize, topped the prize money category.

After winning last year's million-dollar prize, plus another $100,000 for placing No. 1 in the final round, King took his extended family on vacation to — where else — Disneyland.

"So I have three brothers and my parents, and we all went. I think there was 16 of us all together down at Disneyland, and my younger brother announced that they're having a baby there ... so that was fun," King said.

He also used some of the money to make a personal real estate investment.

"We bought a property up in Alaska, an industrial warehouse up there, and invested a big amount of the money and then paid a lot of taxes. But nobody wants to hear about that," King said.

Being a resident of Washington, one of nine states with no state income tax, was a nice plus, King said.

With the season about to begin, King said he's feeling some pressure because his family is counting on him to win again so they can return to Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

"They're asking for it," King said. "I said it's less likely this year than last year, but we'll see what happens."

More information about Battle of the Bids and how to sign up can be found here.