By Laura Rivera
Newsday
SOUTHHOLD, N.Y. — Mark Newman scored a steal last summer when he placed the winning auction bid, online, on a 52-inch, high-definition TV valued at $1,150. He paid $240, then headed to a warehouse 10 minutes from his house to get it. “It was an unbelievable deal,” said Newman, a resident of Farmingdale.
Never mind that the TV could have been stolen. Newman, 53, a retired banker, bought it from an online auction site called propertyroom.com, which sells unclaimed items seized by police in connection with crimes.
Like customers of any auction site, Newman and close to 700,000 registered users of propertyroom.com bid on a dizzying array of items, including jewelry, cars and electronics.
Unlike most such sites, this one has wares hawked by police departments. As of last month, more than 1,000 departments, including four on Long Island, had contracted with the company to clear out their property rooms, where they store stolen and found goods and evidence, company officials said.
According to FBI statistics compiled from 11,686 police agencies, only a third of about $13.1 billion worth of stolen property was returned to their rightful owners in 2005, the last year for which data are available. The rest, if unclaimed, becomes public property.
Most police agencies hold auctions to relieve the crush of unclaimed items, but they attract only so many people.
Sgt. Henry Santacroce of the Southold Police Department said that before contracting with propertyroom.com in 2004, the department’s last auction attracted a scant 20 to 30 visitors, yielding $200 to $300 for goods accumulated over three years. Since then, the municipality has made between $1,500 and $2,000 on items sold through the online site.
The company was spawned in 2001 by Thomas Lane, a former Long Beach detective who thought of expanding police auctions to Internet users.
Each day, 20,000 people visit the site, and residents of 50 states have bought from it, said Lane, board chairman of the company, now based in Mission Viejo, Calif. “It beats having to go to a back lot auction on a holiday weekend,” Lane said.
P.J. Bellomo, chief operating officer, said 95 percent of the items they post online are sold.
Half of the selling price of items auctioned for less than $1,000, and 75 percent of those sold for more, revert to the department’s municipality.
To develop tight security measures, Lane consulted with former Los Angeles Police Department chief Darryl Gates, among others. Company employees tag items with a bar code before transporting them to two warehouses.
Inside the 10,000-square-foot Farmingdale warehouse, workers catalog a motley collection of things: a paint gun, garden elves, a working traffic light.
Watching as the light flashed from green to yellow to red, company vice president Greg Slade mused, “You’d love to know the story behind this one.”
Copyright 2007 Newsday
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