NEW YORK—Sixty New York City taxi medallions sold in auction on July 17 for $110,500 per medallion, below the already depressed prices seen recently in other auctions.
The auction began with a stalking horse bid of $6.5 million, or about $108,000 per medallion, Crain's New York Business reported.
As CUToday.info reported, two weeks ago only three out of 16 medallions to be auctioned off were sold, with the top bid of $138,000.
The prices are far from the days when taxi medallions sold for as much as $1.3 million and numerous credit unions made loans assuming those valuations would never decline.
Borrowers, too, as a recent report from the Mayor’s Office discovered, used the once-high medallion values as collateral for everything from mortgages to vacations.
The crushing debt on many borrowers and the cratering of values has left borrowers with deep financial problems (leading many to file for bankruptcy) and caused the closure of a half-dozen credit unions at a cost of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to the CU insurance fund.