Jonathan Cortez, center: How's $160,200?
Laura Glesby photos
Ken Johnson prepares to up the ante, at Saturday's Bellevue Rd. auction.
“One-seventy-five,” Ken Johnson whispered into his cell phone.
That’s how much a rival bidder had just put down at a foreclosure auction on Bellevue Road. Johnson needed to know from his corporate contact if he could go even higher to buy the foreclosed single-family house before him.
After receiving inaudible instructions from the other end of the line, Johnson called out his next offer: “$177,000!”
That offer wound up being the highest, meaning that the two-story Georgian-style house would soon belong to him — or, rather, to the limited liability corporation he represented.
That was the outcome of Saturday’s midday foreclosure auction at 140 Bellevue Rd.
Johnson appeared at the two-bidder auction on behalf of Park Place Investment LLC, a holding company controlled by local landlord Schneur Katz, who runs Crown Bell Management.
Johnson and about a dozen others — including multiple prospective landlords and a family of curious onlookers — gathered amid light rain outside the Beaver Hills home for the auction.
Only one other interested buyer — a pair of landlords who had driven from New Jersey with their patient French bulldog — actually bid on the property.
“Connecticut has the best deals,” Jonathan Cortez, one of the New Jersey-based hopeful buyers, explained about why he crossed state lines for Saturday’s auction.
Laura Glesby Photo
140 Bellevue Rd.
According to New Haven’s tax assessor’s database, the house at 140 Bellevue had been owned by the same couple for more than a quarter century, since 1996, before falling into foreclosure. One of the owners passed away in 2009. The other, Morris Olmer — a former state lawmaker who participated in a mortgage fraud scheme in 2006 — died in 2018.
When a court summons for the foreclosure was first filed in 2017, no one formally responded to the proceedings. The house ultimately foreclosed over $145,000 in debt, owing mortgage payments as well as taxes and water bills, according to court documents.
On Saturday, all lights were off in the three-bedroom house at the center of attention.
Cortez placed the first bid on the property at $160,100. Johnson countered with an offer of $160,200.
The price escalated slowly at first, $100 dollars at at time. After about five minutes, the competing investors scaled up their offers by $1,000 at a time, then by $2,000, until Johnson made the final offer — $177,000 — that the others couldn’t beat.
Johnson paid for the house on behalf of Park Place Investment LLC.
When asked for a comment, Johnson muttered into the phone that a reporter wanted to ask questions about the sale.
“Absolutely not,” proclaimed the voice on the other end of the line.