Auction.com Rebrands as Ten-X

By Keith Loria, Contributing Editor

Rick Sharga, Executive Vice President, Ten-X

Auction.com has rebranded as Ten-X, positioning the company’s transition into an online marketplace where buyers, sellers, and the agents and brokers who represent them can more easily and efficiently buy and sell high-quality residential and commercial real estate.

“We’ve been evolving for awhile now, and our name was beginning to look like it might be a limitation on future growth in two ways,” Rick Sharga, Ten-X’s executive vice president, told CPE. “One is the word ‘auction’ is very often associated with a way to dispose of distressed assets, and increasingly our business is more and more about selling traditional high-quality properties.”

In fact, nearly 60 percent of the commercial properties brought to sale in 2015 were traditional, high-quality assets, including an office complex in Manhattan Beach, Calif., that sold for $96 million, the largest-ever online transaction of a real estate property.

“The other limitation is that we are creating new technology that will allow people to either choose between doing an online auction or an online transaction that isn’t an auction, and so at that point, the name would be misleading as well,” Sharga said.

That new platform is expected to be introduced in March at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference.

Since its inception in 2007, the company has facilitated the sales of more than 200,000 residential and commercial properties totaling more than $35 billion.

Under the new Ten-X brand, the company will offer three transaction platforms: Ten-X Commercial; Ten-X Homes, which will feature traditional, move-in ready residential properties; and Auction.com, which will continue to feature properties for residential real estate investors.

“Our long-term vision was to address the entire $1.8 trillion real estate market, and that includes the residential market as well as the commercial market,” Sharga said. “Our entry point was really to work with financial institutions and help them dispose of distressed inventory, but the company has quickly been evolving into something that is more of a true online market place where buyers, sellers and brokers can all participate in transactions for more traditional, high-quality real estate assets. That is the driving force behind all of this.”

Sharga wants to make clear that this move is not also a disintermediation play for brokers.

“We view brokers as partners, as customers and an important part of the equation,” he said. “We will be announcing programs that are designed specifically to make brokers feel welcome in this new model as we go forward.”

For more insights on capital markets from Ten-X’s new CRE Nowcast, check out Rick Sharga’s Capital Markets Update video.