For Atlanta broker Chase Murphy, who is within striking distance of winning the top prize in Ten-X's Battle of the Bids competition, waiting is the hardest part. He finds out this week if his final wagers on commercial real estate sales prices will take him from second place to first — and win him $1 million.
"It’s a waiting game now," Murphy said in an email Tuesday.
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 the $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.
Betting in the sixth and final round of Battle of the Bids closed the first Monday in December, and the auction and round ended two days later. The winners may be announced the week of Dec. 10.
Mike King, a Kidder Mathews investment sales broker in Seattle, won the first season of Battle of the Bids and took home the $1 million prize last year.
This year, Kevin Buxton of Buxton Capital Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, holds the No. 1 position with 16,900 total points, and Murphy was in second place as of Monday with 16,650 points. Robert Krumholz of Branch Properties in Atlanta is in third with 16,600 points. Kyle Camilliere, a senior acquisitions analyst at Red Bank, New Jersey-based First National Realty Partners, and Albert Elmore, a Colliers broker in Birmingham, Alabama, round out the top five, each with 16,500 total points.
Players have the potential to pick up thousands of points in the final round. So any of the top five players, or another player who is close, could walk away with the $1 million prize.
Winners of the first five rounds, who each won $10,000 for having the best score in the session, have had scores in the 4,000-to-5,000-point range, Ten-X said. Players who guess the final selling price of all 10 properties in which they bet would get 10,000 points, though Ten-X said that is unlikely to happen based on past performances.
Front-runner Buxton said he expects one of the top five players to date to be victorious.
"I think it’s all going to come down to which properties meet their reserve tomorrow," he said in an email. "Interest was pretty wide spread across all of the available properties this round, so I think whoever in the top 5 currently that ends up having the most properties meet their reserve criteria, will end up winning."
Murphy, a partner and vice president at Skyline Seven Real Estate, said he fine-tuned his wagering as the competition progressed.
"I have been learning from mistakes I have made this season," he said. "Time will tell, but I think it all comes down to what actually sells where you have a chance of getting points."