The view from the kitchen to the family room of the 10-room house, built in 1999, at 10 Justin Rd., East Greenwich.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

In the spring 2008 real estate market, it’s unusual for a seller to have 26 eager potential buyers suddenly competing to buy a property that had been sitting on the market for months.

But that’s just what happened last month when Yannee Doeur listed an East Greenwich McMansion at the drastically reduced price of $329,900. The rambling house, at 10 Justin Rd., had sold for $579,000 on June 1, 2006.

More than 26 offers were made within a week after Doeur listed the property on behalf of Countrywide Financial, Doeur said. He said offers were bid up well over the asking price, and Countrywide chose the bid and terms that were most favorable. The as-is, cash deal is still pending, but Doeur said the sale price is “very close to $400,000.”

“It took me about three hours to download [the offers] to the Web site of the bank,” said Doeur, broker/owner of Rhode Island Realty in Cranston.

The property is assessed by the Town of East Greenwich at $630,410. The10-room, 3,338-square-foot house, built in 1999 and set on rising ground on a small, wooded and ledge-filled cul-de-sac, has four bedrooms and three full baths.

According to records from the Warren Group of Boston, the house was sold to Michael and Kerri Rogers on June 1, 2006, for $579,000, with two mortgages, a first mortgage of $417,000 and a second mortgage of $104,000, both provided by Countrywide.

Michael Rogers said he did not want to comment on the foreclosure.

“It was the talk of the town, that house,” said Sue Powers, an agent with Residential Properties Ltd.’s East Greenwich office. “That was on for 514 originally, and then they brought it down to 499.… These people got in trouble; they wanted to sell quickly,” she said. “Remax had it first,” she said, and then the listing went to Doeur, and the price was dropped.

“Well, of course, people were breaking down the door to get in. It’s just bizarre, what happened,” Powers said. A house of that size in East Greenwich “never should be in the low threes,” she said. “Of course there were umpteen million people knocking down the door.”

But a sale price that seemed so wrong to some local agents was just right to Doeur, a Cambodian immigrant who has been selling real estate for 25 years. He said 80 percent of his business today is foreclosed property.

“We price it to sell, not to sit,” he said. As for 10 Justin Rd., the high bid represents its true market value at this point in time, he said. “It was on the market at 499 for a year and a half, and nobody wanted it,” he said.

The decision to price the house so low that it appeared to be a steal appealed to the psychology of wary buyers, and they drove the price up, an example of market forces at work, he said.

“The more people come, the better price for my seller,” he said.

Doeur said a similar strategy worked in another of his recent transactions, a bank-owned two-family property on Holland Street in Newport.

It was “a very tiny house,” 100 years old, in need of “a total rehab,” he said. The bank priced it at $175,000, and 19 offers came in, driving up the price near $250,000, he said.

“When you observe emotional and psychological behavior of buyers, they want a bargain,” Doeur said.

Right now, Doeur said, he has a house listed on 10th Avenue in the Olde Buttonwoods section of Warwick. It is sitting next to a $1.7-million house,” he said, but priced at $429,000, the Victorian is not selling. “I would price it at 350,” he said.

Foreclosed properties are a unique market. Banks are interested in selling them quickly, and cutting their losses. Every day a foreclosed property sits on the market, it is a target for thieves and vandals. “They sit there being vandalized almost every day,” Doeur said.

Sellers who are not facing foreclosure and are willing and able to wait out the market downturn are in a stronger position, and they are not so quick to agree to price cuts or accept low bids.

This was in evidence at the March 29 real estate auction in Middletown held by the Counts Realty & Auction Group of Virginia. Only 15 of the 24 Newport County properties on the block attracted bids, but all the bids were below the reserve prices set by the sellers, and despite efforts on the part of the auction house and real estate agents, subsequent negotiations failed to bring any buyers and sellers together.

David Lawrence, a broker who owns a Newport agency, Century 21 Access America, with his wife, Jennifer O’Hora Lawrence, said one of his sellers in that auction just thought his properties — 26A and 26B Poplar St. in The Point in Newport — were worth more than the high bids of $322,500 and $335,000. Both properties were recently listed at $380,000.

But Lawrence said the high-pressure setting of the auction, where no contingency for financing was available, scared away more buyers than the prices, because this is a time when getting financing is “a major issue” for many buyers.

For real estate agents who depend on commissions to earn their living, the waiting game can be a losing game. As inventory has continued to climb, and the number of sales has continued to sink, many Realtors have left the business. Last year, the National Association of Realtors reported its first drop in membership in 10 years

“I think the bottom is here,” Lawrence said.

cdunn@projo.com