Today for my wife I had good news and then more good news…I attended a model train auction in Harrisburg, Pa and hardly spent a dime. Then the better news is for the three hours I was there, about 30% of items that were sold brought well over today’s street or retail prices by as much as 20-25%. This to me translates to a very strong hobby and recovery from the last six years.
What was interesting was that 75% of what was sold during my presence was from on line bids leaving those in actual attendence a bit frustrated to say the least. There was quite a bit of mint HO brass, and being a brass guy, I thought this could be a turkey shoot. Not so! I left with nary a thing as did around 50 % of those in attendance during the first few hours of an estimated 6-7 hour auction.
I will never again attend an auction with on line bidding as so much of the energy and “sport” is missing as opening bids were mainly what the lowest on line bid was which for most items, already well over the value of the model. If I want on line bidding, I’ll go to eBay and stand a much better chance of winning the model.
Overall, I found the auction to be run quite professionally and 10% buyer’s premium fair (15% for on-line), but as mentioned I’ll never again attend an auction without visable competitors.
Unfortunately, that is the trend. If you’re looking for GOOD auctions, you are not going to find too many that don’t feature online bidding now. I’ve been in the antiques business for 44 years & there are hardly any auctions anymore that don’t have online bidding. Without it, auctioneers don’t get the best prices for what they’re selling. And without the good prices realized they won’t get many good consignments. So, most are forced to go the online bidding route, like it or not. This is especially true with “specialty” auctions, like the one you went to. For such an auction the auctioneers can no longer depend on just local bidders in attendence. Their job is to get the highest possible prices realized for their consignors & that means online bidders are a must.
Model Train ‘auctions’ can be rather strange. If the material is from a good collection - The prices can be much higher than the original MSRP(but many times that price is 20-40 years old). If it is a rare ‘out of production’ model it will fetch a good sum.
Zane, ‘on line’ bidding is go to stay. It is everywhere(even ‘farm’ auctions here in the Midwest!). Remember, auctions are not setup for the buyer - They are to bring the highest price to the seller.
Yeah, I realize that auctions are for the seller, and it has been years since I attended a model train auction. I was just not aware how popular and main-stream on-line bidding had become. When I do eventually decide to sell my 50 years of toy choo choo accumulation, obviously I’ll go the route of a large auction house with international on-line services.
For now I’ll attend (when locally scheduled) model train auctions for the entertainment and seeing old friends. Even after the seller pays the auction fees, from what I saw last Sunday, this is by far the best way to sell your trains.
Sometimes the “psychology” of a traditional live auction can be so strange (both model train auctions and art auctions, the only kinds I have attended). When there is a particularly fierce battle over an item, if often seems like the room is exhausted for the next item up. More than once I have gotten a good deal on an item when it immediately follows an item that got much of the room riled up.
This impact of room dynamics is less likely when on-line bidding is involved.
That is very, very true! The “in-house” psyshology at an auction can be very strange. I attend a lot of antique & specialty antique & collectible auctions. Sometime auctioneers make attempts to manipulate that psychology. A few years back some of the prominent auctioneers here in the northeast tried an experiment. I think they wanted to see if they could start things off with a bang & set the tone right out of the starting gate. So, they put up a very rare, high end, desirable item as the very first lot of the sale. It didn’t work out too well for them (or their consignors). When the very first item in an auction goes up for bids, a lot of the crowd is still taking their seats, still socializing, hasn’t settled down yet, is sizing up prospective competition or many are just sitting on their bid cards for the first few items, waiting to see what kind of direction the sale is going to take. At a couple such “experiments”, I bought a few $700.- $1,000. “first up” items for a couple hundred bucks! Needless to say, that experiment on the part of those auctioneers didn’t last too long.
A number of years ago I attended an auction that had listed several Lionel items. When they started the bidding on the items, they announced that there was a bid for the collection, if the total of the bids on the individual items from the attendees exceeded the bid, the individual items would be sold. The person that sent in the bid got thumped. The only I could see worth bidding on was the transformer (ZW? or whatever the 4 train control was). The locos and cars were chipped, scraped, dented, rusty and generally even questionable for parts.
Yea, I won 2 of the lots from that auction and was an online bidder. Even tho I only live 40 min from Harrisburg. My buddy I work with picked the stuff up for me today. I will be posting some of it for sale tomorrow on the other RR sites as they were mixed lots and some stuff out of my era.