City officials hope to ease sales of found, abandoned or seized property
With the click of a mouse, potential buyers soon will be able to view and buy some of the Woodbury Public Safety Department’s found, abandoned or seized property courtesy of Property Room, an online auction service for U.S. law enforcement departments.
Woodbury is the second Minnesota police department to use Property Room, which can be found at www.propertybureau.com.
It and Maple Grove are among about 500 departments in 35 states, including the New York City Police Department, that use the service, which operates much as eBay does.
The service works like this: Property Room picks up — for free — all auction items and cleans, stores, appraises and sets them up for online bidding. It also handles payment collections and shipping, taking about 50 percent of the final winning bid on each auction item. The rest goes to the department; items that do not sell are destroyed or donated to charity.
The site is geared specifically toward police sales.
“Our service allows the departments to have (the property) flow out on a daily basis, weekly, monthly or quarterly,” said Tom Lane, a founder and chairman for Property Room. “They don’t have to hold the property.”
Lane said that “99.9 percent of the items we put on our site sell,” while with more than 12 million hits a month, it’s easier to sell online to a worldwide audience than at a traditional auction.

Posted: 08|25|05 at 10:29 am. Filed under: US News.