Coast Bank of Florida passed on the chance to unload a property for less than a third of what the bank loaned on it.

So the bank's foreclosure against developer Michael Tringali will continue.

An auction Thursday evening generated just two bids for the 253-acre tract near Myakka City, for which Coast loaned $4.94 million to Tringali in August 2005.

Tringali then defaulted on the loan, so Coast filed suit to get its money.

The highest auction bid was $1.6 million, which means Coast would take a $3.34 million loss if it agreed to the sale.

"We're not going to accept that," Coast spokesman Tramm Hudson said Friday. "We're not willing to do that."

Bradenton-based Coast is in no position to take that kind of hit.

The company already faces problems stemming from $110 million in loans to nearly 500 home buyers, many of them speculators, who were doing business with Construction Compliance Inc., a St. Petersburg company that has stopped all work.

One analyst has said Coast could be hit with losses of $20 million to $30 million from those loans.

Coast's loan to Tringali is a different story -- one that has raised questions about land values, appraisals and the bank's lending practices.

Tringali's partner, Neil Mohammad Husani, bought the tract for $3.04 million in August 2005. Tringali bought it a week later for $7.6 million and got his loan from Coast based on that sale price.

Tringali stopped paying the Coast loan, so the bank is suing to take the property.

"We see no likely opportunity to get repaid, so we are taking the collateral so that we can either hold on to it or sell it ourselves," Hudson said.

If the bank can't sell the land for the full amount of the loan, it would likely sue Tringali to recover the rest of what it is owed.

Including the Coast loan, Tringali owes banks nearly $87 million for loans that he arranged, with Husani's help, on real estate deals.

Tringali offered a number of homes and lots in Sarasota and Manatee counties for sale at the auction, but few bids came in at more than half of the property's value during the boom.

Hudson wanted to emphasize that Coast did not arrange the auction, even though auctioneer Higgenbotham Auctioneers International hyped it with a "Bank Sells Sell!!!" sticker on its brochure.

"The bank did not order this auction," said Hudson, who attended. "The customer of his own volition decided to try and sell properties in this manner."

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