Property Disappeared Before Initial Bid Period Over

[Austin McConnell]

I saw something strange today and wanted to see if anyone else has had a similar experience.

I had my eye on a HUD house that popped up in my area. The house was classified Insure-Escrow and had a 15 owner-occupant bid period with a 10 day bid collection period. As far as I understand the process, HUD will collect the bids for 10 days and review on the 11th day. If no acceptable bids, there will be daily collection and review periods for the next 5 days until the 16th day when investors are allowed to bid.

As I plan to live in the house for a few years while fixing it up and saving up the next downpayment, I placed a bid in the initial bid period for owner occupants. That 10 day collection period was scheduled to end tonight at 11:59:99, but the hudhomestore listing disappeared around 10am today roughly 14 hours early.

Clicking on the property in my saved property list, I get the message that "This property is not listed for sale at this time". I can only take that to mean another bid was accepted and the property taken off the market. But how can that happen if the initial bid collection period was not up?

Granted, I got my bid in last week and if it simply wasn't accepted, fine. But we debated taking more time to run some numbers, get some quotes, and make a bid today before the cutoff at midnight. If we had waited, we wouldn't have gotten a bid in at all!

Has anybody seen this type of thing before? Am I missing something?