Todd Talbot Will Auction $127,300 Arizona Home For A Penny

Todd Talbot’s recently foreclosed home in Glendale, Arizona was appraised for $127,300 in 2010. Those were the days. Today, people are selling their homes anyway they can and using the latest technology to do so. There are people selling their homes using social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook.

Talbot”s home is currently on the online chopping block and being auctioned. The starting bid for the property was a penny. That’s right, one red cent. Luckily for Todd, or actually for the bank, the bid has risen substantially (at least in the world of penny auctions) to $2.42 as of Tuesday morning. According to ABC News, this is the first penny auction for a house.

Sadly, it’s not really that hard to believe that today, according to CoreLogic, one in five homeowners is underwater on their mortgages. Todd Talbot’s plan for making money on the auction of his foreclosed home is through the bids. He’s counting each and every penny. Each penny bid costs a bidder 60 cents. So you can see, that could really add up. Slowly. At the end of 2011, foreclosures made up about a quarter of all home sales. That’s why it’s being referred to as a foreclosure crisis.

For Arizona, the crisis has been especially hard. In Arizona, at the end of 2011, thirty-eight percent of all home sales were foreclosures. Nearly half of all homeowners in Arizona are underwater with their mortgages. For an example, Todd Talbot bought his house for $81,000 in January in a foreclosure sale and spent $20,000 fixing it up. His home appraised for almost $27,000 more than he currently has in it. So for Todd’s sake, everyone is hoping the pennies people are bidding on his property will add up fast.