No Takers at Auction for Balboa Inn, Luxury Home

In a pair of multimillion-dollar foreclosure sales Tuesday, two Newport Beach properties were returned to lenders after a public auction failed to produce any bidders.

One property is the nine-bedroom Harbor Island home that the late Duayne D. Christensen bought for $5.2 million. Christensen and Janet F. McKinzie, his confidante and business manager, have been accused in a lawsuit of illegally siphoning $20 million from his North America Savings & Loan Assn. in Santa Ana. Christensen died in a car crash Jan. 16, the day regulators seized his S&L.;

The other property is the Balboa Inn, purchased for $4.2 million nearly two years ago by a group headed by National Basketball Assn. star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The historic hotel is part of a series of sour deals that has prompted Abdul-Jabbar to sue Thomas M. Collins, his former agent and business manager, for $55 million.

Christensen’s Harbor Island home, which he never lived in, went to note-holder Hugh Bancroft when no one was willing to pay $4.97 million for it. The price consisted of $4 million in principal, $921,000 in interest and $49,000 in attorney fees, sale costs and other expenses.

Bancroft, who owns Bancroft Motorsports Inc. in Costa Mesa, at first wanted to tear down the home and build a new one but now may sell it, a spokesman said.

The Balboa Inn reverted to previous owners Chien Shan Wang and his wife, Huei Yu Wang, after the property failed to fetch the minimum bid of $2.74 million. The Wangs, Chinese immigrants who own a number of motels, had sold the inn in 1985 to Balboa Investments Ltd.