For most real estate agents, the idea of selling a multi-million-dollar property without a reserve price might feel like financial suicide.
But for Trayor Lesnock, the Florida-based founder of Platinum Luxury Auctions, it is a proven surgical strike against a stagnant market.
From the sun-drenched streets of Fort Lauderdale to the most exclusive enclaves across the globe, Trayor has made a career of turning the nerve-wracking concept of “zero reserve” into a tool that attracts serious buyers and drives results.
In the ultra-competitive world of luxury real estate, where properties can linger on the market for years waiting for the right buyer, Trayor’s approach flips the script.
By removing the safety net of a minimum price, he lets the market dictate a property’s true value, creating a sense of urgency and transparency that traditional “list and wait” strategies often fail to achieve.
“We actually use no reserve auctions almost exclusively,” he says.
“For perspective, we had 29 properties offered last year and only two had a reserve. The rest were without reserve.”
The strategy is designed not just to accelerate a sale but to fundamentally shift the power dynamic.
When a property is offered without a reserve, Trayor argues that buyers feel a sense of opportunity and empowerment.
They are no longer chasing a seller’s ego, he says; they are competing for an asset based purely on its perceived value.
This psychological shift is currently being tested on the Triton Villa, a US$50 million estate in Turks & Caicos.
The property, a veteran of Netflix’s Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, is set to go to the block on April 17.
“Once you launch, there’s only one way it can end, and that is with the sale to the highest bidder,” Trayor reiterates.
“You can’t cancel or change anything after you’ve begun the auction, or else you’re exposed to legal risk from the buyer who could say, ‘Hey, I bid this price, and you have to sell to me.’ We’re extremely careful about only launching an auction if we have the confirmed seller’s blessing and everything is in a line, all the ducks are in a row, because you can’t make changes after you’ve initiated the sale.”
For Australians, the auction is a cultural staple, but in the United States, the process carries a different weight, and Trayor explains that high-income buyers are often wary of the format.
“Even to this day, we still work against that auction stigma a little bit here for folks in the United States with high incomes because it’s just different.
“If I say I was at a real estate auction, you might picture me in a hooded sweatshirt standing in the rain on the courthouse steps in Detroit or something. It’s just a part of the American lexicon that, arguably going back to the Great Depression when they started liquidating a lot of real estate on courthouse steps, that kind of just carried forward.”
The safety net of ‘opening bids’
Trayor is also quick to point out that his clientele are not the desperate or the distressed. They are the frustrated elite.
“I’m working on the entirely different end of the spectrum as compared to any of those foreclosure distressed properties,” he says.
“Just very wealthy people who don’t need to sell and don’t have to sell, but they’re frustrated that they have not been able to do so using the traditional methods.”
To mitigate the perceived risk of the “zero reserve” model, Trayor employs an “Opening Bid” program, which is like a financial insurance policy for the seller.
Bidders are incentivised to submit written, binding bids prior to the auction in exchange for a financial incentive.
He explains: “What that does is create some form of insurance, if you will, for the seller … he is not going to have pricing fall off a cliff. What it does not do is show the seller what the sale price is going to be because what those opening bids do, very consistently, is show a portion of what somebody is going to pay.”
Buyers are encouraged to submit binding bids prior to the auction in exchange for a financial benefit.
“Let us say I, as a buyer, can pay $45,000,000 for the property, but I will put in an opening bid, perhaps around $25,000,000… in putting forth that bid, I receive a financial incentive based on my bid.
“So when it is time to calculate my eventual auction price, let us say I end up bidding $42,000,000, and then I have my buyer’s premium on top, but because I had my $25,000,000 opening bid, I can discount my price slightly based on a percentage of savings I obtained from that opening bid.”
The growth of Platinum Luxury Auctions, now spanning 33 states in U.S. and 15 countries, suggests the model is resonating.
For the Triton Villa, the enquiries are pouring in from London, New York, and Australia, and Trayor maintains that despite the grandeur, the math of a successful auction is surprisingly intimate, focusing on quality over quantity.
“You can have a tremendous bang-up auction with three or four people, and that can be equivalent to the same result as an auction with eighteen or nineteen people,” Trayor says.
“Every auction comes down to two. You may start with eight, twelve or four, but the majority of the audience will eventually be exhausted, and it will come down to the final two strong bidders. Those final two may carry three or 30 per cent of the price. It really takes only two.”
As the luxury market continues to recalibrate after the frenzy of the pandemic, Trayor believes the “list and wait” era is reaching its expiration date.
“Nowadays, there are more multi-million-dollar homeowners going to auctions than there have been in the past,” he says.
“It’s about creating transparency, urgency and trust in the process. Buyers understand the value and sellers achieve results. Everyone wins.”