My UNOFFICIAL GUIDE IS POSTED!!!!!!!!!! And an addendum is added.......

C'DaleRider

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Jan 13, 2000
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We buy the contents of a room for $30. Emptying the shelves of the room, the copying room, we find a new sealed MS Office v. X for Mac, a Pitney Bowes postage machine, 4 brand new sealed HP color laserjet printer carts, and tons of sealed copy machine toner (Konica and Sharp).

I finally get around today to plugging in the Pitney Bowes machine and it fires right up. Check its balance, figuring it'd have a dollar or two of postage left on it, and it has $576 and change. Free postage for quite a while!!!!


See my last post for my unofficial guide to auctions.................
 

jtusa

Diamond Member
Aug 28, 2004
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Wow, that's a pretty nice take for $30. I'd say you got your money's worth.
 

vi edit

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 28, 1999
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Those Pitney Bowes machines are worth their freaking weight in gold. Good god they cost A LOT of money to purchase/lease.
 

nice!

my old man did a room purchase at an estate sale and got a king sized brass bed, brass lamps, brass chandalier, and an assload of brass wall decorations - all for 50 bucks
 

habib89

Diamond Member
Jan 17, 2001
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dude, that's awesome.. if only for the fun factor.. for $30 you got christmas in summer!!

i didn't know they actually sold contents of a room.. i thought it was just cars, or other pre ex-con owned items.. does that mean you have to clean out the room and leave it for them to store more stuff in?? or can you just take what you want, and ditch the rest?
 

Quasmo

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2004
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I live in Savannah... I'll give you $15 for half... actually what color laser do the cartridges work on?
 

Nebor

Lifer
Jun 24, 2003
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Originally posted by: Quasmo
I live in Savannah... I'll give you $15 for half... actually what color laser do the cartridges work on?

For some reason you don't seem like you're joking.
 

OutHouse

Lifer
Jun 5, 2000
36,410
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Originally posted by: vi_edit
Those Pitney Bowes machines are worth their freaking weight in gold. Good god they cost A LOT of money to purchase/lease.

Yea no kidding. My first job in computers was working at a Mail shop and they had 8 of those machines. When they broke and the tech had to come out to fix it it was major $$$. WHen I didnt have much to do i would help out on the floor, one of the things i did was take the machines down to the post office to put postage in them. each time I had a check for $50,000. Yea that place pumped out a lot of junk mail. A lot of it was EAS stuff. Bill Phillips loved direct marketing.
 

C'DaleRider

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Jan 13, 2000
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Originally posted by: RossMAN
C'DaleRider,

How did you discover this bankruptcy auction?

Sorry I didn't get to answer your question earlier.......I just had to crash last night. I'd been up almost 20 hours and have another auction at 10am this morning, leaving in about an hour from now.

I found out about it from the auction house I frequent on Thursday nights (household auction every tThursday). The auctioneer was the one who worked the Savannah Symphony auction. He had fliers at the last Thurs. auction announcing this one. It also ran as a advert in the legal section of the Savannah Morning News, the Sav. newspaper.....another good place to find such auctions.

We also find a few on teh 'net......searching GA/SC aucions on Google. I go to at least three a week locally and get a lot of info on what/where/when from there....fliers and word-of-mouth.

Other stuff I got...............a HP 6P Laserjet printer with a brand new toner cartridge, $10; a 17" Princeton monitor, $5; a pair of PII 350mHz computers complete w/Win2K for $5 each; a pair of mahogany framed armed side chairs, upholstered in a flame-stitch pattern (using them in the dining room) for $2 each; a living room chair...walmut frame, carved arms and legs, grey upholstery, for $3; a pair of table lamps in varigated black marble and gold, $30each (most I spent on any single item that day......but I've seen these lamps retailing for around $300 apiece); a Pelouze 5lb digital postal scale, $6; an Iomega Zip100 drive, external w/power supply (clear blue case) for $4; tons of paper and envelopes......probably enough to last years and years; and lost of other junk. All electrical items worked perfectly.....which is different for an auction. (My rule of thumb for electrical items at auctions is: If they don't plug it in, it probably doesn't work.)


As far as splitting out the stuff.............well, sorry. It's being "auctioned off" right now as we speak. The Mac Office sold the next day for $125, which about paid for my day of bidding. A set of the HP laser cartridges, a cyan, a magenta, and a yellow (carts C4193/4/5A for HP printers 4500/4550) are currently at $50 each on ebay ($7 shiiping for one, $3.50 additional for each additional cart. bought). The copier toners (Konica and Sharp) just went up last night. I'd planned on selling the Pitney Bowes machine until I found out it had that balance, so I'm going to keep it.....I do need to buy a new ink cartridge for it, but a $40 investment for a $576 return seems like a good deal.


If anyone wants to know about auctions, I'd be glad to pass on some pointers on stuff I've learned over the 6 years I've been going to auctions............there IS a little to pay attention to and things to do and not do.
 

C'DaleRider

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Jan 13, 2000
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Originally posted by: habib89
dude, that's awesome.. if only for the fun factor.. for $30 you got christmas in summer!!

i didn't know they actually sold contents of a room.. i thought it was just cars, or other pre ex-con owned items.. does that mean you have to clean out the room and leave it for them to store more stuff in?? or can you just take what you want, and ditch the rest?

To answer your questions:

There are MANY different types of auctions.........auto, household, antique, junk, and more. This was a bankruptcy and they were selling off the contents of the Savannah Symphony offices. Everything left in the offices was sold.

The way this auctioneer worked this auction, as many others work in this situation, is this: We'd enter an office. He asked if anyone wanted any particular item for individual bidding. If anyone did, the item was put up for bids and then sold to the highest bidder. After all individual "wants" were doen, the contents of the room that were left was auctioned off as a whole.

While they'd like you to completely empty out the room or section or whatever that you won, we culled through and took just what we wanted and left the rest. Part was not wanting to cart off stuff we'd enver be able to get rid of, the other part was transport space limitations. The stuff had to be removed that day and our Blazer can hold only so much. We were getting hit with the outer edges of Hurricane Jeanne that day and our trailer is an open one, so we didn't bring it with us, meaning we could only take with us what could be packed into the Blazer............and it WAS PACKED!!!
 
Sep 29, 2004
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Originally posted by: troytime
nice!

my old man did a room purchase at an estate sale and got a king sized brass bed, brass lamps, brass chandalier, and an assload of brass wall decorations - all for 50 bucks

He got the chandeleir? That's part of the house though ....