In our many years in the auction business, we have observed a number of criterion which any potential user of our services can recognize to determine if they may be ready for an auction. Typically, we have found that our job is never to convince a prospective seller that they need to auction, as they [...]

Auction Venues There are many settings in which an auction can be conducted. Some of these venues go back hundreds or thousands of years, many have come about only in the past dozen years. All can be effective in their own way, and there is no single best way to conduct the actual auction. Perhaps [...]

Mario Piatelli “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm”-Aldous Huxley. My hero, Mario Piatelli, has been selling to the highest bidder since 1948. I met Mario in 1997 when we referred me a large real estate auction in Heard County, GA. [...]

My First Radio Appearance On September 7th, I was invited to participate as an auction expert on The Commercial Real Estate Show, a weekly national broadcast. The taping took about an hour, but it was a very quick hour! I shared the booth with our host, Michael Bull, a banking expert, and another auctioneer. We [...]

The Ability to Promote Adequately in the Marketplace A fundamental difference between the auction approach to marketing real estate and other methods such as ordinary brokerage is the time element. When sellers approach us with an auction assignment, it is not with the idea that they want to sell it “in the next 6 months [...]

The Ability to Sell for Current Market Price This section is perhaps the most crucial element of the determinants of a successful auction. It is the area most novices to the auction profession have the greatest difficulty with (ie brokers who are trying the auction model because their model hasn’t been working to well recently). [...]

Adequate Information A primary difference between auctions and most negotiated sales has to do with the elimination of contingency clauses from auction contracts. In an ordinary contract, such as most brokers use, the buyer puts up a token amount of earnest money, perhaps as low as $500 to $1,000 on a contract for a price [...]

Motivated Seller In our previous section, we spoke of strong demand as a very important element of a successful auction. Unfortunately, this scenario is pretty rare in real estate auction practice. The more typical scenario is that the seller typically considers an auction as a last resort, after having listing it unsuccessfully for a period [...]

Please allow me to take this opportunity to throw out a few words about Social Media. Now I have to admit a secret here and tell you- I am not a particularly social guy! However, I do read a lot of online articles about current events that shape our market, and I do have some [...]

There are many elements required in order for an auction to be successful. These include strong demand, motivated seller, adequate information for a buying decision, an ability to sell at the current market price, and the ability to promote adequately in the marketplace. Not all elements must be present for an auction to be successful, [...]