Thrift Bailout Agency to Hold Clearance Sale : Finance: The auction in November of seized real estate could save taxpayers $1.6 billion.

WASHINGTON —  The savings and loan bailout agency today announced its “great fall inventory clearance sale” as part of an effort to sell $50 billion in assets from failed thrifts by the end of the year.

L. William Seidman, chairman of the Resolution Trust Corp., the government agency charged with selling the assets of failed savings institutions, announced a Nov. 15 real estate auction, which alone is expected to generate sales of $1.6 billion.

Seidman also said the agency is working to reduce its inventory of 247 failed thrifts by 130 by year-end, which would reduce the RTC’s asset inventory by $50 billion.

The auction, to be held in Dallas, will offer hotels, office buildings, shopping centers and an 18-hole golf course in Corpus Christi, Tex.

Seidman said the auction’s prize items include a Radisson Hotel near the San Antonio airport and a downtown Phoenix office building that formerly housed the corporate offices of Western Savings and Loan.

“We tried to pick properties we thought would interest major buyers,” Seidman said.

Each of the 71 commercial properties listed for auction is valued at more than $1 million, for a combined appraised value of $336.8 million.

A listing of the properties reads like a road map to the savings and loan crisis, which is expected to cost taxpayers between $132 billion and $500 billion.

Most of the properties, 38, are located in Texas, followed by Florida, 12; Colorado, eight; Arizona, six; California, four; Louisiana, two, and Illinois, one.

The list comprises 31 shopping centers appraised at a total of $128.1 million, 28 office buildings valued at $146.6 million, six hotels appraised at $34.3 million, three warehouses valued at $4.3 million, and one health facility, the golf course and one apartment complex, with a combined value of more than $23 million.

Jon Karlson, the RTC’s assistant director of real estate asset marketing, said the agency hopes to sell about half of the properties at the coming auction.