What Is Everyone's Feelings About Auctions?

KNOW WHAT YOU'RE BUYING!

In most jurisdictions, the auctioneer is assumed to be little more than a cashier in terms of product knowledge. If he holds up a brass buck and says it's gold, it's up to you to know better.

In person auctions, especially farm and estate sales, are a great place to dump fakes. Even if you can find the auctioneer later, he's usually under no obligation to refund your money. You had your chance to examine the coin.

Auctions can be fun/profitable, for really strange reasons.

One auction was starting at a crawl. He'd ask a starting price, lower it four or fives times to get the first bid, then they'd eventually bid it up to near or above his original asking price. This was on every single lot.

After a few minutes, they brought up a box of stuff I noticed several people were interested in. I figured I'd at least save him the trouble of riding the price down to the first bid. He asked for $20, I said "one dollar", he slammed the hammer in a fraction of a second and yelled "sold! for one dollar!"

Other bidders were ticked off royally, and you could hear them griping back and forth. The auctioneer simply said "folks, we're here to sell this stuff, and I don't want to be here all night playing games. If you want something, bid and let's go."

From that point on, things moved considerably faster.

I've been to in person auctions where I ended up with coins for pennies on the dollar. I have been to others where everything was hitting 3 times retail. It just depends on the buyers and the auctioneer. A good auctioneer can drive the price up more than double what it should sell for by prodding the right people. I've seen it done countless times. I've also seen terrible auctioneering. One that comes to mind was a coin and sports card auction where the turnout was so terrible and bidding was so weak he should have cancelled the entire auction. I was the top bidder, taking about 90 percent of the collection, and I paid no more than 5 cents on the dollar for anything.