Anyone can publish a screen before an auction. Almost nobody publishes what happened afterwards, because the screen usually looks worse than the sales page implied.
Butte County’s re-offer ran 7–10 August 2026 on Bid4Assets. We published all 105 parcels before it opened, each with a band from one division — opening bid ÷ the county’s own assessed value. The auction has closed and every result is public, so this is what our own screen was worth.
What happened
28 parcels sold. 76 drew no bid at all. One was withdrawn before the sale. Sell-through, against the 104 actually offered: 26.9%.
The withdrawn one is worth its own sentence. It opened at $2,447,008 — by itself two thirds of everything the county was asking across the entire list. It came off before the gavel, which is exactly what our redemption work says happens to the valuable end of a list. Excluding it, the county asked $1,224,436 across 104 parcels and recovered $317,760 — 26%.
Where the screen worked
Among the parcels the screen could actually rate, it ordered them the right way:
| Screen band | Offered | Sold | Sell-through |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deep discount | 15 | 5 | 33% |
| Discount | 33 | 6 | 18% |
| Near value | 12 | 3 | 25% |
| Above assessed | 9 | 1 | 11% |
Three times the sell-through at the cheap end as at the dear end. That is the screen doing its job: the parcels asking least relative to the county’s own valuation are the ones bidders wanted, and the ones asking more than the county thinks the land is worth mostly sat there.
Where it was blind
Now the row we left out.
Thirty-five of the 105 parcels are assessed by the county at under $1,000 — one at $1. Those are Proposition 13 leftovers from decades-old nominal transfers, not valuations. Divide a real opening bid by $4 and you get a number that is arithmetically correct and tells you nothing, so we now band those separately and rate them not at all.
They had the highest sell-through on the list: 13 of 35, 37%.
And they were bid up hardest. The three parcels that drew the most competition, measured against their own opening bid, were all in this group:
| Opened at | Sold for | Multiple | County’s assessed value |
|---|---|---|---|
| $6,436 | $31,236 | 4.85× | $4 |
| $5,392 | $15,000 | 2.78× | $35 |
| $10,834 | $29,100 | 2.69× | $4 |
A parcel the assessor carries at four dollars fetched thirty-one thousand. The bidders could see something the assessment could not, which is the honest summary: our screen is blind in exactly the place the market was most active.
That is not a flaw we can fix by changing the arithmetic. It is a limit of the input. Assessed value under Proposition 13 is anchored to the last change of ownership, and on land that has not changed hands since the 1970s it stops carrying information. Where that happens the ratio has nothing to say, and we would rather print “no usable ratio” than a confident-looking number.
The other thing the results show: nobody was competing
Sell-through is only half the story. Of the 28 that sold, 13 went at exactly the opening bid — a single bidder, no contest. The median winning bid was 1.02× the opening.
So the picture is not a crowded room. It is a mostly empty one, in which a handful of parcels drew real competition and everything else either went at the floor or went nowhere. On a re-offer list — parcels that already failed to sell once — that is about what you would expect, and it is worth knowing before you assume you will be outbid.
What we changed because of this
Two things, both already live:
- Nominal-assessment parcels are their own band now, not “Above assessed”. Before this scoring they were counted as opening above the county’s valuation, which put all 35 of Butte’s in the danger bucket and flattened the sell-through table into meaninglessness — 33% / 18% / 23% / 32%, no ordering at all. The ordering above only appears once they are pulled out.
- Our re-offer piece lost a claim. It said 42% of Butte’s list opened above assessed value against 9% of Fresno’s first offers. On the corrected basis Butte is at 9% and Fresno at 10% — there is no gap. What survives there is the median ratio, and the comparison inside a single Fresno sale.
Sources
- Bid4Assets auction pages for the Butte County re-offer, 7–10 August 2026 — one page per parcel, read after the close for winning bid and status. Winner identifiers are published by Bid4Assets in redacted form and are not captured here.
- Butte County Treasurer-Tax Collector re-offer list for the same auction, and the county assessor’s 2025–26 roll as republished on each auction page.