Going, going, gone for a total of $200,050.
Well, it was an online auction, so no one was shouting out bid prices or slamming down a gavel, but that’s how much money Auction Markets LLC raised during the first sale of Truland Group Inc. trucks. Auction Markets closed bidding earlier Friday for nearly three dozen vehicles, and Auction Markets’ Stephen Karbelk said the sales generated a significant amount of interest.
“We had 34 vehicles, and they all sold,” Karbelk told me following the auction’s close. “We were pleasantly surprised. We had a significant amount of activity. We don’t disclose the number of bidders, but it was very well attended.” Pending court approval, Karbelk said he is planning to hold another auction next month with what could be 100 or more trucks.
The auction, authorized as part of Truland’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation, is part of the trustee’s efforts to raise money to pay off creditors as well as employees who were shorted their final paycheck when the Reston-based electrical contractor abruptly shut down July 21 and filed for bankruptcy two days later.
The final bid prices ranged from $1,980 for a 1992 Car-Mate utility trailer on up to $14,630 for a 1998 Ford F800 Conventional Cab. Bidding for the Ford opened at just $1,500. Karbelk said the vehicles he has seen so far have been in pretty good shape but are high-milers with in excess of 100,000 on their odometers. Since many of them were bought in 2010 or 2011, he said, that’s not unusual for a a construction-related vehicle logging 30,000 miles or so a year.
Truland’s shutdown caused no shortage of bad blood for impacted workers — from more than 1,400 at one point, the company had between 700 and 800 at the time of its bankruptcy — and Karbelk said he can understand why many of the employees who were told to take their vehicles home with them on the weekend before the shutdown are still upset. At the same time, he said he is urging employees that still have vehicles to contact Auction Markets so he can sell them to raise money that could ultimately result in those workers getting their final pay.
Meanwhile on the bankruptcy front, I learned earlier Friday that Truland left as much as $7.5 million, or as little as nothing, on the table for its work as a subcontractor to Hensel Phelps Construction Co. on the Marriott Marquis Washington D.C.
Wiley Rein LLP lawyer H. Jason Gold, who is representing the Truland trustee, said the company was owed $7.5 million, but that amount would have come down to $3.6 million after subtracting change orders, creditors and other reductions. When you throw in contractor warranties for any problems that might surface on the job, Gold said, the trustee determined there was not enough value to pursue any of that money. The project, along with the troubled National Security Agency project in Utah I’ve written about before, is one of several Truland’s estate has agreed to turn over to BMO Harris Bank, Truland’s largest creditor.
