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The Altoona Housing Authority plans to advertise for help from a real estate broker to market its 10 scattered site properties, after a request for proposals didn't produce a single bid closer than $10,000 to any of the properties' appraised values.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development needs to approve the bids, and the ones that came in were clearly unacceptable, authority Executive Director Cheryl Johns told the board at a recent meeting.
One bidder offered $5,000 for a property appraised at $60,000.
Four properties generated no bids.
The high bids for the remaining six collectively fell $106,000 short of the total appraised value of those properties, which is $330,000.
The appraised value of all the properties together totals $505,000.
The appraised values for the nine that include buildings -- one is a vacant lot -- range from $40,000 to $70,000.
There were 11 bids from five bidders.
The board is expected to formally reject all of the bids at its meeting in July, according to an authority official.
A real estate broker might be able to market the properties to a wider group of people, said Robin Beck, authority chairwoman.
There was speculation at the meeting that bidders might have thought mistakenly that the properties were being sold for failure to pay taxes, Beck said.
One of the problems might be that the bidders were planning to redevelop the properties and so needed to build in a profit, Beck said.
Board members believe that families who see the properties as future homes for themselves would offer better prices, she said.
HUD gave the authority permission to sell the properties several months ago.
The authority first proposed to sell them in 2011, but HUD rejected its initial application because the authority failed to make the case at first that renovations would be too expensive in relation to the original development costs for the properties.
The authority wants to sell the sites because they're costly to maintain. This requires workers to travel to make repairs, and the homes' lack of uniformity makes it harder to buy materials and supplies in bulk.
The authority hopes to use the money from the sale of the properties for upgrades to other properties and to rejuvenate its rent-to-own Home Choice program.