Technically a bug in maven-versions-plugin (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MVERSIONS-201), but fix groupId references that contain a property.
Running mvn versions:set -DnewVersion=[version] will now work.

git-svn-id: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomee/tomee/branches/tomee-owb-1.1.x@1479854 13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68