Bent Mountain mansion auctioned for $520,000
That price was for the home and 7 acres; all told, the multiparcel property drew bids totaling $1.69 million
Susan Overstreet Leonard
Friday, August 9, 2013
Bidders struck deals Thursday night for a mansion and about 900 acres of land on Bent Mountain as the financially distressed owner sat in a green jacket watching in the corner of a hotel conference room, his hand to his chin at times.
The scene was an absolute auction of a vast swath of a northwest Franklin County mountainside, where Mark Oliver had planned a luxury mountain community during the middle of the last decade. He completed his home in 2009 but the rest of the project did not come together, and he recently decided to sell everything.
About 70 registered bidders began making offers late Thursday afternoon in a room at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood.
“The deers are so big up there, and the turkeys are so plentiful that it’s just absolutely amazing,” declared auctioneer Russell Seneff of Woltz & Associates as he tried to coax bids out of the crowd, which munched on finger food and drank iced tea.
“Are we done?” he asked near the end of the two and a half hour event. “Everything out here is a deal tonight.”
Susan Overstreet Leonard, a speech therapist from Vienna, Va., whose brothers own Northwest Hardware in the Roanoke Valley, submitted the high bid for the priciest of 30 parcels: a 7,400-square-foot home on seven acres that belongs to Oliver.
“I feel like I’m coming home. I love the mountains,” said Leonard, who bid $520,000 and plans to live at the address.
As for the other parcels, two had conventional homes and the rest either were home and cabin sites or recreational land. All told, the property brought total bids of $1.69 million. Buyers were required to sign contracts and pay deposits on the spot.
Monty Blankenship, 64, of Bent Mountain, had toured some of the property by bicycle and foot. “I was just astounded by the beauty of it,” he said. But his $20,000 bid for 50 acres of vacant land was overridden.
“I’m kind of relieved I got out,” he said. After his initial bid was accepted, he had a moment of uncertainty, he confessed.
“I thought, ‘My God, what did I do?’ ’’ he said.
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THE ROANOKE TIMES
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