83 Smith St., in Cranston, will remain on RealtyBid.com until Jan. 19, when bidding closes.

Last week, real estate agent Tom Piantadosi was managing a group of about 120 foreclosed properties, many in Providence. About 45 were on the market. But only one of those properties was listed on RealtyBid.com, an Internet real estate auction site.

Piantadosi, who works for the Remax Town and Country agency in Cumberland, said a representative of the owner bank asked him to list the property, a three-family at 150 Benefit St., in the Darlington section of Pawtucket, on the online auction site. It was one of just five Rhode Island properties listed on the site last week.

The list price for the multifamily is $179,900, and the “starting bid” on RealtyBid.com was set at $128,000. This is not the “reserve” price — the confidential minimum sale price that is acceptable to the seller. A 3-percent commission was offered to the buyer’s agent. The City of Pawtucket has assessed the property at $273,800 ($200,400 for the building, and $73,400 for the land.)

Piantadosi said he has used online auction sites a few times before, with no success, and this case, so far, has been no exception.

“First of all, I just never even get any calls, on any of these, for people to see the houses,” he said. “Maybe it works in other parts of the country.”

Charles Sipes, a process engineer, is taking the “for sale by owner” route in marketing a luxury custom house he and his wife, Charlene, had built just three years ago in the village of Harrisville in Burrillville. Sipes said they want to downsize and are not in a hurry to sell. He has placed a listing for the house on eBay, the popular auction site for a wide variety of consumer goods. It was the only house in Rhode Island on the auction site last week.

The starting bid for the house at 85 Glendale Meadow Lane is $750,000, and the “buy it now” price is $875,000.

Sipes said the house has 4,400 square feet of living space, including four bedrooms, three full baths and one half bath. The Town of Burrillville has assessed the property at $538,000 — $130,700 for the land and $407,300 for the house. But Sipes said the house has so many luxurious amenities, including marble baths and custom-made red-birch kitchen cabinets, that his price range is fair. “We did not scrimp on one single thing,” when the house was built, he said.

Sipes said he doubts the house will sell through an actual auction on eBay, but he thinks eBay could help lead to a sale by generating interest. He said it cost him $200 to have the house posted on the site for 30 days, a rate he called “dirt cheap.”

Sipes also has an ad for the house on Craigslist.com. Craigslist is not an auction site, but sellers can place photos, property descriptions and contact information there.

Sipes said he has hired real estate agents in the past, with success, but in this case, he prefers to try it on his own, even though the real estate market is “just absolutely horrible” right now. He said he is unwilling to pay the $40,000 or so it would cost for the services of an agent.

Sipes said he is an “eBay freak” who has bought and sold many items on the site. He said he sold a boat, a 32-foot cabin cruiser, for $25,000 on eBay. The buyer, who was from Oregon, had a trailer specially built to transport the boat across the country, he said.

RealtyBid.com has sold about 12,000 properties through online auctions since it was founded in 2001, according to Daphne Shannon, the company’s marketing director. The site is national, but she said it has probably done more business in the Southeast and the Midwest than in the Northeast to date.

“The Midwest has been very big for us,” she said.

Shannon said the business grew significantly last year: the number of listings was up by more than 165 percent over 2006, and the number of sales jumped 157 percent over the 2006.

But business is seasonal, and while there were 2,602 listings in November, there were only 186 listings last week. “January is a slow month for us,” she said.

Shannon said RealtyBid.com is especially suited for “motivated” sellers and buyers who are looking for a bargain. Bank-owned properties are a natural fit, because banks “are trying to move” their inventories of foreclosed properties, she said.

“We are not a retail site. We are a discount site,” she said. But sellers of newly built homes and other properties that are not in foreclosure also use the site, she said.

RealtyBid.com accepts listings only from real estate agents, who are charged $100 to “load” a property onto the site. But the site makes most of its profits through transaction fees, usually paid by the buyer.

The company seeks to be “a complement to traditional real estate agents,” not to supplant them, Shannon said. “We want to be a part of their arsenal.”

These days, Piantadosi is working almost exclusively with foreclosed properties. “That’s all I’ve been doing for the past two years,” he said. “I saw [the foreclosure crisis] coming,” he said. “I’m working 100 hours a week.” It takes time, but the bank-owned houses and multifamilies eventually sell through traditional channels because most banks are routinely cutting prices until they do, he said.

David Kaplan, an agent with Keller Williams, is using the RealtyBid.com Web site as just one part of his effort to sell a house in the Edgewood neighborhood of Cranston, at 83 Smith St. The three-bedroom, 1924 Colonial has views of Johnson & Wales University’s Harborside campus from the backyard. The list price is $199,900, but the starting bid price on RealtyBid.com was $123,000. Again, that is not the “reserve” price — the lowest price the owner is willing to accept. Kaplan said the house, which is unoccupied, is not bank-owned. It is assessed at $191,000.

Kaplan is using traditional sales tools, including print advertisements, the statewide Multiple Listing Service, and open houses, as well as Internet marketing. Kaplan has 83 Smith St. posted for sale on Craigslist.com.

Kaplan said this is his first experience with an online auction site, as part of an effort to be innovative and try different approaches in today’s challenging market.

“The online bidding gives buyers an opportunity to purchase a home at a fair price, one that the seller previously agreed on,” Kaplan said. He added that the online auction site he is using offers “a much safer alternative for buyers than traditional auctions.”

Buyers don’t have to have nonrefundable certified checks, they have the right to conduct “all the inspections of a traditional purchase and sales contract,” and the offers are “subject to financing and appraisal,” Kaplan said.

But Kaplan said that the most effective marketing tool remains setting the right price. “Sellers … they don’t understand. It’s all about pricing,” he said.

“The banks, unlike the general public — they’re able to come down on the price periodically,” Piantadosi said. “The banks reduce the price every few weeks.”

cdunn@projo.com