Dean Williams is chairman and CEO of Williams & Williams Worldwide Real Estate Auction. He co-founded Williams & Williams in 1986, along with his father, auctioneer Tommy Williams.

RealtyBid.com, an online auctioneer since 2001, will auction 1,500 REO properties in the month of September. One major lender valued the wide-ranging types of homes at more than $142m. That total will be added to $450m worth of property auctioned since the start of 2009, a 26% jump from the same date in 2008, according to a corporate release. The September auction offers properties from nearly every state, and their ability to offer bargain pricing attracts opportunistic bidders, says Mike Keracher, the company’s vice president.

Auctioneer Williams and Williams is making television interactive. The Tulsa, Okla.-based real estate auction house will auction 70 homes during a live television program on the ION Television network. The “absolute” auction means there are no price reserves on the homes and the highest bidder will be awarded the property.

Chris Kavanagh and Sarah Cantrowitz join real estate auctioneer REDC as vice president and managing director, respectively, of its commercial real estate auction division. Kavanagh comes to REDC after serving as vice president of dispositions at Granite Investment Group, where he successfully disposed of a $350m commercial and multifamily portfolio.

A private equity firm came to the rescue of struggling Chicago-based real estate auction house Sheldon Good & Company. Sheldon Good auctions residential, commercial and industrial real estate. New York-based Racebrook Marketing Concepts, led by former Sheldon Good executive John Cuticelli Jr., acquired the firm. Cuticelli said he will move the firm’s headquarters to New York City on August 1, but will maintain a regional office in Chicago.

Foreclosed real estate auctioneer REDC tapped Fannie Mae [stock FNM][/stock] veteran Chip Hidinger to head up its new default solutions division as senior vice president. Hidinger brings more than 16 years of default industry experience including a post at Fannie, where he managed a substantial portion of a servicing portfolio there and all active servicers. He also helped pioneer paperless modifications and the servicing lender initiatives that brought the Home Saver Advance program to the industry.

The foreclosure auction space is hot, and with a high volume of properties to auction and profit to be made, it also seems to have grown a bit crowded, with an old complaint flaring up this week between two competing auctioneers.

For many US homeowners, a house represents their greatest asset and largest investment. For one visitor to RealtyBid.com, however, that asset is about to become the cheapest investment. Try 0% LTV. That's the premise behind a new house-a-month giveaway, "The House Game," an online trivia game that enters participants in the running to win a post-foreclosure house, whether or not they answered the trivia questions correctly.

Summer comes early tomorrow as the Northeast will see its housing market heat up over a series of real estate-owned (REO) auctions. Auctioneer Hudson & Marshall of Texas is poised to launch a series of REO auctions throughout the Northeast. More than 200 bank-owned homes valued from $20,000 to more than $500,000 apiece sit on the auction line-up from June 16th through June 21st.