News Summary

HAMILTON — The Hamilton Police Department is saying goodbye to its twice-a-year, in-house auctions and hello to 365 days a year worldwide Internet auctions.

That's because the department has decided to join more than 700 other law enforcement agencies across the U.S., by auctioning its stolen, unclaimed, recovered or found property on a Web site called propertyroom.com.

The Web site, which offers free sign up and is run by retired police officers headquartered in Southern California, is similar to Ebay and Yahoo auctions, police officials said.

"Basically, what they're (propertyroom.com officials) doing is they're picking up our property on a monthly basis and they're selling that over the Internet so it goes out worldwide," said Lt. Gerald Martin, services commander for the Hamilton Police Department.

"Whatever price they get on those items if it's under $1,000, we get 50 percent of that, and if it's over $1,000, we get 75 percent."

The city paid no up-front costs to sell its items on the Web site because the company gets its fees from the auction sales, he said.

Web site officials picked up their first group of items from the department on Tuesday. They'll be available for auction beginning this week, said Rob Payne, property officer for the department.

Hamilton Police Chief Neil Ferdelman said his department learned about the Web site from the Fairfield Police Department, who recently signed up for the service.

"I asked the officers down there and I asked the chief how it worked and they said, 'we love it, it's really good'," Ferdelman said.

"It's (the Web) a trend of the future... that's where a lot of people are going to purchase property so I think it would make sense for a municipality to jump on that bandwagon because we're going to be bringing some money back into our city coffers. It's a smart way to do business."

He said since department officials liked what they saw, the department decided to join other law enforcement agencies untilizing the service.

Ferdelman said the Web site will benefit the city in several ways.

"We're always looking for ways to get a better bang for our buck and it (the Web site) allows us to probably return more money into the general fund and into the city of Hamilton with less time and effort from these guys (from Payne and another part-time identification officer who run the property department)," he said.

The department also will save money because it won't have to pay staff overtime to prepare for auctions and the move also will free up personnel to perform other duties as well as storage space, police officials said.

Payne said the department has made anywhere between $3,000 to $17,000 from previous auctions of 300 to 400 items that were sold to the public including bikes, jewelry, scanner radios, car stereos, computers, fishing equipment and tools.

The department believes it will make more money for its general fund by using the Web site.

"The materials we've read from departments that have done this show an increase in their revenues over time by doing this service instead of their own auctions," Payne said.

However, he said property that is recovered by the department such as firearms, drugs or bb guns or switch blades will not be available for auction. Due to licensing restrictions, no computer memory or registration will be sold with computers either.

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2190 or dewilson@coxohio.com.