Estate Auction

Sounds like you went to a real auction. Not just an estate sale. Big difference. I used to go to lots of auctions until I met someone I went to school with at one. He worked for the auction house and told me his job was to sit in the audience and bid on things that they would signal him to bid on. This was for items that were not going well and his bid would make the prices go up. After that I stopped going to auctions.

If you know what it is worth and stick to your guns and not bid over you set price.... emotions can make you forget your self and over pay for stuff, you will not get burnt.

I too heard about auctioneers placing their onw people in the crowd to bid up on items just to raise the price or just point to someone in the back of the room and fake a bid just to get the price higher.... I quit going to one auctioneers sales when I caught him at it.

I'm sure this does happen with some shadier auctioneers, but it is illegal and they can lose their license if they are caught doing it. The problem is proving it. It is often hard to for a participant to tell where a bid is coming from. and since most auction houses reserve the right to bid on items for their own accounts you have to prove the bid was placed strictly in order to raise the selling price and not because the auction company was buying it for themselves.

I used to go to local estate auctions to try to buy coins (and sports cards when I was dealing on those) and rarely won anything. Items would almost always go way higher than their worth. Bought a 5000 count Wheat cent bag at one a year ago for $195. Obviously searched, but not for varieties, as I pulled a pair of 1944 d/s out of it.

I must be the freak then. Almost all of my coins have been bought at auctions. There are days I've taken a bucket of money and not spent a dime and there was a day I wrote a check for a couple thousand more than I could cover. That day in particular I was buying silver at $4 - $5/face dollar less than I knew I could sell to the shop. I owned it for an hour and a half and cleared almost $900.

You have to be patient and pick your spots. I love the sheer treasure hunting aspect of it.

As for ringers bidding to run up prices, highly illegal and out of the dozens of auctions I've been to I have never even suspected it. At open auctions the employees are allowed to bid on and buy items and that might be what you have seen since you are talking about items that aren't bringing bids. If they see something cheap they are going to snag it.

Sometimes it goes super high, especially common date circulated dollars. But there are days you just can't stop buying things you don't need because there is value to be had.

Search the auctions. If you are lucky one has a couple gold coins and a bunch of Morgans and another has everything else. Go to the one that has everything else because all the local auction buyers will hit the one with gold and Morgans.

Amazing. Someone actually thinks it's ok to be unethical, merely for the sake of making money.

Wow.

Estate sales and auctions are quite comical when a little common sense is applied. In the case of a death, the family will come in and take out any valuables like gold and silver first. They can pawn that off and get quick cash.

Then, finally do you really think the auctioneer is going to put up gold bullion when he could pay for it himself?

Remember there are millions of people out of work so any job is a job. And if it pays, many, many people just don't care what it is. This thing with auctions is more common than people realize and as already noted, suppossed to be illigal but difficult to prove. And it's not just with auctions. By me a large department store chain waa going out of buisness. One I used to go to a lot. During the so called close out sale, I went there to see what I could get cheap. Noticed a lot of the merchandise was not what was nomally handled there. In a discussion with one of the sales people, I found out that an organization buys such stores, loads them with merchandise from other places that have gone under so they can get rid of it all as if a close out. Not illigal but amazing how many companies have their little methods to make a buck.