Bob Elliott, CEO of real estate development and investment firm Lantian, leveraged his professional experience to guess the exact sales price of three properties — and came close with another — during an auction that ended the third round of the Battle of the Bids competition.
As a result, in winning the round of the Ten-X contest, "I was a little surprised, but a lot of things broke my way," Elliott 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.
Elliott's correct guesses involved what an office building, an industrial building and a Courtyard by Marriott hotel would sell for at a Ten-X auction of properties. Elliott said he placed a total of 10 wagers in the third round, four on multifamily, three on healthcare and two on industrial properties, with seven bets producing points that helped him win the round.
In the third round, Battle of the Bids players won a total of $270,000 in prize money. Twenty-six properties sold during the auction for a combined $75.7 million, according to Ten-X. The properties up for auction last week received an average of 10,601 page views during the round.
Elliott said he realized he got his first bull's eye, as Ten-X calls precise guesses, just after 1 p.m. on the day the auction closed last week and could feel his bid to win the round gain momentum.
"I was stunned," he said. "I had already had a number of other bids that were close (I think one was $100,000 off). At that point, I had over 2,000 points and I still hadn’t used either of my 'changes' yet so I thought I might have a shot at winning! By 2:30p.m., I sniped two other auctions (now I had 3 bids exactly right) and 4,200 points. Then I just had to hang on and hope that no one would beat me."
Experience Pays Off
Elliott is the third $100,000 winner in the Battle of the Bids competition. Marcianne Foster, a senior client services specialist at Colliers in Tampa, Florida, was the first, and Transwestern broker Tony Strauss of the Minneapolis area won in round two.
Elliott, who joined Bethesda, Maryland-based Lantian Development in 2016, has more than two decades of development and investment experience and has worked with each major property sector in areas across greater Washington, D.C. He said his experience running the boutique private investment firm helped him as he predicted sales prices for properties in the Ten-X auction.
"We actually acquire a lot of larger land parcels and do longer term entitlement work, looking at things that may not necessarily be ready for the market now, but things that might take 10 or more years to sort of come to fruition," Elliott said. "But I've done office, multifamily, retail, student housing, all in the DC metro area for the last 20 plus years."
Elliott said his background in finance and design also helped as he played Battle of the Bids, having started his career as an architect and working on projects with the scale of skyscrapers and airports out of Chicago for five years. He later went to business school and into real estate finance, joining the management team of a software company for a couple of years before coming back into property development.
Elliott said he probably will hold onto most of his $100,000 prize but definitely not all of it.
"The first thing that came to mind was that I could probably, guilt free, take my kids to either go see Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo," he said. "I don't have to worry about concert ticket prices at this point."
More information about Battle of the Bids can be found here.