Have you been oging to auctions long? Just curious.........an admmited aucton-addict, I've been attending auctions and estate sales/auctions for going on 4 years now and there are some things one should know about how they work........
First, estate auctions/sales are for disposing of unwanted goods left when one/both family members die and the survivors (read children) don't want to deal with or take the goods, or for disposing of the goods when one remaining family member can no longer take care of his/herself and must move into an assisted living situation, or someone "weeding out" a large collection prior to moving or retiring or whatever (the latter typically called living estate sales). After the survivors pick over the belongings of the passed on ones, an auction company is contacted to dispose of the goods, usually at the site (house) or sometimes at the auction company's auction barn.
Second, not everythign you'll see at an estate sale is really from that estate. Aucitoneers, who usually have a permanent location from which they have routine sales of household goods/antiques/collectibles/ etc., will "fill in" an estate sale with goods from their barn in an attempt to attract more people to the sale in hopes of driving prices up, thereby maximizing their profit. You'll never know what is really part of the true estate and what's part of the "borught in" stuff unless you frequent that particular auctioneer's regular sales or have a friend who knows that auctioneer and his/her "habits".
Profit for an aucitoneer, as an aside, is derived from two sources........the buyer's premium, and additional percentage of the winning bid added to the final price the winner pays (typically 10% but can be higher, lower, or in rare cases, non-existant) and the seller's premium (the percentage the auctioneer "takes" from the winning bid prior to paying the seller (typically 20-25% of the total......and you thought ebay's fees were bad......a typical auctioneer collects 35% of the winning bid from each item sold, so it behooves the aucitoneer to drive the price up as high as it will go, and I'll talk about that in a moment.)
The auctioneer will pad or "add" stuff to an estate sale, as I previously mentioned, to attract more potential buyers. Auctioneers LOVE outdoor estate sales as they usually bring higher prices for stuff vs. routine indoor sales at their barns. This is because the routine, scheduled sales at their houses/barns usually only attract the same group of people......dealers and the odd private individual. Estate sales, on the other hand, tend to attract, as you noted, a lot of private individuals who'd enver think of going to an auction house/barn sale as well as dealers, and if the estate sale has some odd or unusual items, such as a collection of Chase Co. items, dealers will flock in.
Case in point...........an estate auction I attended a few months ago had a large collection of U.S. Mint Proof sets and individual Proof coins.........Vietnam Memorial Proof set, 1994 Olympic Proof set, 1999-2002 Clad and Silver Proof sets, a sheet of uncut $2 from 1976, 32 on the sheet, among others. These coins, in beautiful and absolutely proof condition, brought a darned good price at the sale. Found out a month later that the coins had been brought in and added to the estate sale and were actually on consignment to the auctioneer. He'd been sitting on them for 3 months while he was waiting for an estate sale he felt was going to be big enough to bring them out to get top dollar for them............and it worked.
Now.............for the hidden part. Not all bidders are the same. Not all auctioneers are the same. It helps if you've attended several auctions by the same auctioneer as you can spot/understand what's going on. It helps greatly if the auction house assigns permanant bidder numbers to the bidders.....helps you spot the auctioneer's shill bidders. For auctions that have bidder numbers that are assigned only for that auction, only by going to that auctioneer's auctions repeatedly will allow you to notice the auctioneer's shills. I'm not saying ALL auctioneers use shills......some don't, but it's few and far between the ones that don't. We've been caught by the shills before, driving up the price on us when we were actually the only ones interested in the item. Fortunately, we've been going to most of these local area auctions long enough to know who their shills are, and we'll bid the item up and quit leaving the auctioneer stuck with the item with no actual payment for it......love catching them in that!!!!
So how do the auctioneers get the junk they sell? There's one I attend that is a weekly sale on Thursday evenings. Matt, the auctioneer, goes to storage rental auctions and buys the lot of a unit, buys out estates before they ever get on the market (when an auctioneer has been in business long enough, he'll get calls from family members to ask if he's interested in purchasing a house as an entire lot....simpler for the family to dispose of the stuff in one fell swoop but not as good for the bottom line), and takes consignments from private sellers.
Another auctioneer, Greg in Waynesboro, also takes some consignments, buys out houses, and spends most weeks scouring the mid-West and NE with two trucks and trailers looking for stuff. Greg's sales are held monthly, so has time to find things and can be more selective in what he sells. Greg's sales tend to be of a much higher end vs. Matt's.
Noonie's auctions, held the first and third Saturdays, is a pure junk sale. The items are unloaded by the seller as they go under the hammer for sale. Noonie's prices usually tend to be low, but there is no inspection time at all.....the items are not seen until they're unpacked as they go on the table for sale, so you really never know what condition the item's in until you have it in your hands. You can go look but the bidding is going on at the time and if you hesitate, you probably will lose out.
About buying at these things.......if you like it, buy it. Hang the price. But watch out for paying more than retail for an item............have seen that happen more than a few times. If you collect something, auctions and estate sales are an excellent way to find the unusual and unique. As a private collector, you'll always be able to comfortably outbid any dealer because the dealers have to take into account the margin for profit after winning the item. If the price climbs too high, the dealers will abandon the bidding. The private collector, on the other hand, is working from the perspective of the auction price vs. buying in a sotre/shop. The auciton's final price is almost always going to be lower.
Another tip..........if the item is gas powered or electrical and it is NOT shown to function, ie. they don't fire it up or plug it in and demonstrate it works, it probably doesn't work!!! This isn't always true, but in the majority of cases, it is. I collect watches and clocks, so I always wind them up or plug them in and see if they work and keep proper time. Some older models, and more unusual and rare speicmens, I'll accept non-functional, but I take into account thecost of repairing it when bidding.
Auctions can be lots of fun but can be intense. Don't lose an item for a bid....you never know, that next bid you make may be the one the person you're bidding against won't match. Try to keep from getting auction fever, though.........see it happen every auction I go to and people get so caught up in the bidding and trying to outdo someone else they lose sight of the value of the item and tend to vastly overpay for an item. At an estate sale I went to yesterday a couple caught the fever and paid WAAAAAAAY to much for a chrome-plated Timex Railroad pocketwatch, nicely displayed in a domed stand/case. Now, there are some decent ones out there, but when you open the back of the watch and see 1989 stamped on the movement and the face has Taiwan printed on the bottom, you know it's very recent vintage and not worth much more than $20..........and the bidding got up to $65 when it ended. A 4 year old Sharp 27" television, nothing special....almost a typical Wal-Mart TV, remote was lost, ended up at $150. Guess that wasn't too bad, but a 4 year old TV with NO warranty? Puh-leese. You can find the same quality on sale under $200 routinely, and the sucker paid $150 winning bid + 10% buyer's premium ($15) + sales tax on the total so far ($9.90) for true total of $174.90. No so much of a bargain there.............but he got the bidding fever and lost his mind.
