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Re: Tonight's auction...

By: De_Composed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (0)
Tue, 12 Mar 24 3:03 AM | 41 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 51019 of 60008
(This msg. is a reply to 50962 by De_Composed)
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How NOT to Run an Auction:

We just finished with a small Massachusetts auction.. Nobody was there. The auction house did an abysmal job of advertising the auction. Or it chased away the potential buyers with a $5 starting bid on every item. Or the pickup location was lousy (who wants to drive into Massachusetts??) Or . . . some other reason? I don't know, but it was a ghost town. It was the least active auction I've ever been to, and we won every single item we wanted at prices well below what we'd have been willing to pay if there'd been competition.

Get this: Of the 59 auction lots, just seventeen sold. (Usually, an auction of 300 lots might have six or seven that don't sell.) Twelve of those seventeen sales were to us. All but two of our wins were at the $5 starting bid.

Nearly everything at this auction was either a pocket knife or garage hardware - and not very interesting garage hardware. The hardware we won included things like boxes of screws and nails, tool chests with the usual miscellany you see in tool chests, pegboard tools (including a couple of nice pipe wrenches), and two bigger items on which we had slight competition. Those two were a collapsible Carpenter's Workbench ($8 ) and a "Flex-O-Ladder II" ($18 ) that I think is 16' when extended. If so, it might be $200 new - though I see one now that, in 2017, sold at auction for $14.

Including the 18% auction house fee, we spent a total of $83.78. I figure the auction house is going to walk away with MAYBE $15 for all their time and trouble. And THAT is one poorly done auction.


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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Tonight's auction...
By: De_Composed in 6TH POPE
Fri, 08 Mar 24 9:18 PM 		Msg. 50962 of 60008

An upcoming art auction I'm watching has several Linda Le Kinff paintings, two of which are shown below. As you can see, I actually understated what her works usually go for at auction. The piece we won, however, was six dollars.

Another Le Kinff being sold at this auction, a small (5" x 20") watercolor, has a starting bid of $325. Starting bids aren't the same as selling prices, of course. Art that has a set starting price often fails to get any bid and has to be auctioned several times before it finally sells. But that isn't really my point. I'll watch these two pieces and see if they actually do get any bids. If they do, the bid sure won't be mine! I prefer finding art and jewelry in "miscellaneous" auctions... where the auction houses may not know any more about the things they're selling than I do. Sometimes they know less.

Le Kinff's art reminds me of Tarkay's, except that Tarkay is quite famous since his pieces are often seen at cruise ship auctions and in auctions elsewhere. A huge difference, though, between Tarkay's art and Le Kinff's is that the Tarkay's always seem to be serigraphs, lithographs and prints. (I'm not an artist. To me, these three terms all just synonyms for "mass reproductions.") A given Tarkay painting might have 1,000 copies manufactured and sold this way. The Le Kinffs I've seen, though, are originals... to the best of my understanding. They are priced similarly to Tarkays but are far more collectible, for me anyway. I always prefer original works.

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