Town Auctioned on eBay Up for Sale Again

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Nearly two years after he bought the tiny town of Bridgeville, Orange County financial adviser Bruce Krall said Friday he plans to re-auction the Humboldt County hamlet on eBay next month.

"Due to family reasons, I'm pretty much tied to Southern California for the foreseeable future," Krall said. "We can't move up there. It only makes sense to pass it on to somebody else."

Krall said the auction will open April 4 with a minimum bid of $1.75 million _ more than twice what he paid for the 83-acre property about 40 miles southwest of Eureka.

Bridgeville, a picturesque village with about 25 people on the Van Duzen River, sparked a bidding war in 2002 when it became the first town ever put up for sale on eBay.

The buyer, who won the auction with a $1.78 million bid, never came to see the property and the deal fell through. The property was eventually posted on traditional real estate listings, and Krall bought it for about $700,000 in May 2004.

Since then, Krall said he's invested "multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars" to restore old buildings, remove dilapidated structures and clean up mounds of garbage. He also found new tenants for the houses and received a conditional use permit for a riverfront resort.

"It's come full circle," Krall said. "Now it's been fixed up, and I think it's actually ready to be sold on eBay."