The Lighter Side

Live auctions can be a lot of fun and, for some, they are social gatherings. Many local auctions have a true following. New people come and go all the time but the regulars are there at almost every auction. Although many know each other by name and know all kinds of personal details about each other because of their long associations, when the auction starts business is business and they don't hold a grudge when they lose an item to someone they know.

A few years back when we had our auction house, we bought a local estate. There were hundreds of pieces of pottery and hundreds of oil paintings. The problem was that none of the pottery was of any value and neither were any of the paintings. However the price was right so we bought it.

The goal of most auction houses is to own as much of the merchandise as they can at the right price. There is usually more profit in the items owned by the house than the commissions they would make from selling items that belong to other people. We owned a weekly auction that ran roughly 450 to 500 lots a week. That's a pretty sizable operation and because of the time constraints that come with getting a weekly auction ready, it's difficult to do the necessary legwork associated with buying estates so we didn't buy too many.

We sold the pottery from this estate on tray lots which means anywhere from 7 to 10 pieces together for one price. We did pull out a handful of what looked to be medium to low end paintings that we could actually sell individually. The rest of the paintings were sold in large art lots, each lot for a single price.

We carefully researched the paintings we selected because you never know what you have just by how it looks. In our opinion, none of them proved to be of any value but the ones we chose to sell separately were all in nice vintage frames. These paintings were all given item numbers that fell within the last 25% of the auction. It is common practice to sell all the better merchandise within the first 200 lots and the less valuable items later on.

Our podium was raised up and in the middle of the floor with the audience in front of the podium in theatre style seats. The auctioneer and the clerk resided on the podium. The clerk is the person who records the price and bidder number of each item as it is sold.

During the last portion of this particular auction, I was filling in for the clerk who was taking a well-deserved break. As expected, the individual pieces of artwork that belonged to us were selling for between $25 and $40 each.

All of a sudden, the last one was up for auction. The auctioneer asked for $25 and got a bid and then he got another bid and another bid and another bid until the painting got to $5000! At least 9 different people were bidding on it. It was very exciting! Based on our research, I never expected that painting to be that valuable but things like this happen at auction all the time. I don't have to tell you that I was very happy that we were going to make $5000 on an item we expected to sell for $25.

Suddenly I heard the auctioneer yell, "Sold. $5000 to buyer number 477." While I was recording the price and the buyer number, I was also trying to decide what we should do with all that extra money. My head was spinning. Should we be practical and put it in a CD? Should we do something frivolous with it? Go shopping? Take a vacation? Go to a casino? Put it down on a new car? Then the auctioneer turned toward me and said nice and loudly over the microphone, "April Fool!"

Everyone in the building was howling with laughter. The entire audience and the staff were all in on the joke. The auctioneer had set this up with some of the regular bidders before the auction started. I got a huge round of applause for being a really good sport and for not firing the auctioneer. The good news was that it would take another seven years before April 1st fell on auction day again!

Written by Anne Benedetto, Auction House Talk
 All Rights Reserved

.