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Estate auctioneers find larger audience, sales online
Aug 05, 2012 (The Columbus Dispatch - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Shortly before 4 on a recent Wednesday afternoon, about a dozen people gathered at the rear entrance to a nondescript warehouse in Worthington.
When the doors opened, the group filed in to claim purchases: electronics, furniture, jewelry, tableware and other merchandise that, until a few weeks earlier, had decorated central Ohio homes.
Welcome to the new landscape of household auctions.
The warehouse belongs to Auction Ohio, the most aggressive of several central Ohio auction companies that have replaced the thump of a gavel with the click of a mouse.
Driven in part by the difficulty of attracting bidders to traditional auctions, a growing number of auctioneers have turned to the Web.
"I used to get 150 people at a good old Clintonville sale. Now, I'll have 75," said Bob Cassel, owner of Cassel & Associates auctioneers. "Some 35-year-old guy nowadays doesn't want to spend a Saturday afternoon standing around an auction eating hot dogs. They'd rather bid on their smartphone."
For buyers, online auctions offer an opportunity to bid from afar.
"Why go to auctions when you can sit in your easy chair with your computer " asked Avalon Cavalieri of Westerville, who showed up at the warehouse to pick up 11 items, mostly jewelry, that she had recently won in the bidding. Andy Gayhart of Circleville arrived to claim an unusual purchase: 43 Canadian dollars that he bought for $28."You can definitely find good deals in these places," he said.
For sellers, the auctions offer alternatives to traditional auctions, tag sales or do-it-yourself sales through newspapers and websites.
"This is just so much easier than having people come through the house in a tag sale or going to eBay or Craigslist," said Nancy Dressel, who used Auction Ohio to sell furnishings from the Bexley home that she and her husband, Jim, occupied for 46 years.
Some of the area's larger auction houses such as Garth's Auctioneers & Appraisers in Delaware and Apple Tree Auction Center in Newark have combined online auctions with traditional auctions for years in an effort to expand the audience for the high-end collectibles and art they sell.
"It's really leveled the playing field between Delaware and New York City," said Amelia Jeffers, president of Garth's, whose auctions attract online bidders from throughout the world.
"We used to sell ivory netsukes at Garth's for example -- ceremonial Asian carvings. We'd sell two or three to a lot for a few hundred dollars, but the reach was very limited and the prices were affected by that reach," Jeffers said. "One of the first times we put them online we got $10,000 or $12,000 apiece."
In "simulcast" auctions such as Garth's, buyers can bid in person or online during the event.
In the past few years, other central Ohio auctioneers such as Columbus Online Auctions and IRS Auctioneer have ventured online with another model.
None has done so to the extent of Chris Davis, owner of Auction Ohio.
"There's a growing number who do online, but Chris has really set the standard for that in our industry," said Peter Gehres, the vice president of auction operations at Gryphon Auction Group in Lewis Center and the treasurer of the Ohio Auctioneers Association.
Davis began combining online bidding with his live auctions about a decade ago. Four years ago, he dropped the combinations in favor of either a live auction or an online auction. Since the switch, he estimates he does 10 online auctions for every live one.
"We're to the point where we're doing 20 to 25 auctions a week," Davis said. "You can't do that in the live auction world. Before we started doing this, we were doing two or so auctions a week."
Davis' auctions work like eBay or other auction websites. He and his employees enter photos and descriptions of items to be sold onto his site. Once all items are entered, bidding typically begins -- and lasts up to two weeks.
Each auction has a designated end, but, unlike eBay, that deadline can be extended if bidders are still competing.
Suzan Smith, owner of the downsizing company Suzy's Helping Hands, said she learned the value of online auctions after her first auction with Davis, which fetched $6,000 for a desk and dresser that she estimates might have otherwise sold for $1,000.
Smith will go to Garth's and other auction houses for special antiques or unusually valuable items but hires Davis to help sell routine items. Columbus Online Auctions and IRS Auctioneer, which were launched by auctioneers who used to work with Davis, operate in a similar manner. "We're offering this at the right time, when people are so busy," said Kevin Burchett, who founded Columbus Online Auctions in the spring of 2011. "Going to an auction and spending three, four, five hours is very costly to most families now." The firms typically charge 35 percent of the total amount fetched in the auction plus the cost of hauling the furniture, though the charges can vary.
One of the biggest challenges to online auctions is lining up bidders. Auction Ohio hasn't advertised (though Davis is mulling over a "bid-in-the-buff" advertising campaign), but Davis said he has accumulated a list of almost 10,000 bidders.
Another challenge is authenticating merchandise. Traditional auction houses note that their online-only competitors offer little assurance that the merchandise is exactly as described.
"We have a 60-year history," Jeffers said. "We stand behind what we sell."
Another challenge can sometimes be getting bidders to pay up.
"We're seeing more and more complaints against online auctioneers," Gehres said. Common complaints, he said, include delays in getting bidders to pay (and therefore delays in payments to sellers), inaccurate descriptions of merchandise, lack of professionalism and damaged goods.
To combat some of the problems, Gehres advises homeowners to focus on the professionalism and expertise of the business conducting a sale instead of the mechanics of it.
But the biggest drawback to online auctions might be the buyers' inability to touch the merchandise and get swept along by the excitement of a live event.
"Online buyers don't bid on items in the same way as getting caught up in the moment and bidding against someone across the room," Cassel said.
Because of those things, traditional auction houses think there will always be a place for the rapid-fire patter of a live auction.
"To just say you can take your entire business online and be successful, I'm not buying it," Cassel said. "It doesn't work for everything." Niche items or collectibles can especially benefit from a wide Internet audience, Cassel said. To capture the niche audience for American art pottery, for example, Gehres operates a company called Belhorn Auctions that simulcasts all its auctions.Gehres and others who hold live auctions think there will always be a place for them.
Others think the traditional auction will fade away.
"I honestly think this is the future," said John Rogers, founder of Innovative Revenue Solutions, which runs the IRS Auctioneer website.
jweiker@dispatch.com
___ (c)2012 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio) Visit The Columbus Dispatch
(Columbus, Ohio) at www.dispatch.com Distributed by MCT Information Services
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