When he closed his first commercial property deal as a new business owner last summer, Kevin Buxton figured he would expand Buxton Capital Group slowly and steadily. Then he won Ten-X's Battle of the Bids competition, where players wager on commercial real estate sales prices, and pocketed the $1 million in prize money.
Buxton plans to invest his post-tax payday into Buxton Capital Group, a Delray Beach, Florida-based investment firm that specializes in buying industrial properties. Winning the six-round competition, he said, is a major boost for his business plan.
"This will effectively fast forward my company and career by two to three years," he said in an interview.
Inthe Ten-X Battle of the Bids, players place bets each round on what the final sale price will be for 10 properties to be auctioned on Ten-X, the online commercial real estate exchange owned by CoStar Group, the publisher of CoStar News. Ten-X awards the winners in each round prizes totaling up to $3 million, including the $1 million grand prize to the player who accumulates the most points. Ten-X said the competition is the biggest of its kind in commercial real estate.
Buxton won with 19,800 total points. Kyle Camilliere, a senior acquisitions analyst at Red Bank, New Jersey-based First National Realty Partners, finished in second place with 19,300 points. Camilliere won a total of $115,000 during the six-round competition. Jared Joella, vice president of acquisitions at Atlanta-based Branch Properties, placed third with 18,750 points. Joella's winnings totaled $111,000.
Mike King, the Kidder Mathews investment sales broker who won the $1 million grand prize in the first season of Battle of the Bids, came in fourth place in this just-completed second contest with 18,650 points. King won $20,000 this season.
Buxton's winnings for the competition totaled $1,012,000, according to Ten-X. He also received $100,000 to donate to the charity of his choice. He chose The Miracle League of Palm Beach County, a nonprofit group that provides children with physical and mental disabilities the opportunity to play baseball.
Buxton, who loved playing sports while growing up in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and Birmingham, Michigan, said he picked his charity after talking with people who ran the Miracle League. "It just gave me goosebumps," he said, "and I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do."
Buxton started his career as a mortgage banker at Quicken Loans, after nearly six years he decided to get into commercial real estate and started in the University of Miami's Accelerated MBA in Real Estate program. "It set me up with two paid internships," said Buxton, who graduated and worked for Atlantic-Pacific Communities and Redfearn Capital before deciding to start his own firm last fall.
"I feel like I had learned just enough to be dangerous on my own," Buxton said. "I took the leap."
In July, his leap of faith paid off when Buxton Capital closed on its first deal, the purchase of a 32,000-square-foot industrial building in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina. Buxton Capital bought the property for $4.05 million and negotiated a 10-year lease with Taylor Made Golf Co. to occupy it, "as cool of an industrial tenant as possible," Buxton said.