Baltimore County PD to take auction of stolen property online

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Jun 30, 2004 by Chet Dembeck

The Baltimore County Police Department is planning to take its annual auction of stolen and unclaimed property online.

The department asked the County Council at its work session yesterday to approve a two-year contract with PropertyBureau.com Inc. of San Clemente, Calif.

It will free up storage space for us, said Police Major Bill Kalista, after he explained the contract to the council.

If the council approves the contract when it next meets, PropertyBureau.com will immediately dispatch trucks to the department's property room and pick up items like televisions, stereos, refrigerators and new clothing.

We have thousands of items, Kalista added.

PropertyBureau.com will take them back to its warehouse and test, clean, barcode and photograph them. The items will then be listed and sold on its auction site to the highest bidder.

Currently, we only have auctions once a year, said Kalista.

Last year, the county police's in-house auction generated $27,548, but it only netted $18,000 because of storage and other related costs.

The prices the items will fetch online are likely to be higher because they have been tested by PropertyBureau.com and are offered to millions of buyers rather than to just a handful of Towson-area dealers and consumers, according to Thomas P. Lane, the privately held company's chief executive.

In return, PropertyBureau.com will collect 50 percent of the first $1,000 sales price of each item sold and 25 percent of any amount over $1,000.

A former Long Beach, N.Y., police officer and detective, Lane got the idea for PropertyBureau.com in 1999 after witnessing the soaring success of online auctioneer eBay.

But eBay was just a big marketplace that wouldn't give much visibility to goods in a police property room, Lane said. I realized there was a niche for this market.

Since then, 400 police departments throughout the country have signed on with PropertyBureau.com, including giant law enforcement agencies like the New York Police Department and smaller forces like the Ocean City Police Department.

More city, state and federal agencies are discovering the benefits of selling their seized property online, according to Jenny Lynch, a spokeswoman for Bid4Assets.com, another niche online auctioneer based in Silver Spring.

For example, the U.S. Marshals Service has been working with Bid4Assests.com since 1999 to sell property it seizes in the course of law enforcement.

They include such high-priced collectibles and luxury items as a vintage 1952 Mickey Mantle sports card that fetched $19,511, a 1999 Lamborghini Roadster and a 2,000-acre ranch in Montana.

The way the economy has been, agencies need all the revenue they can get, Lynch said.