It was back in 2002 when your columnist, disguised as the Sunday Age Spy, caught auctioneer James "Jimmy the Gun" Tostevin using his dear papa as a dummy bidder. Boy, did the doo-doo hit the wind machine after that one but, happily, things have been ironed out in real estate since. Under the squeaky-clean new rules of engagement, today's house-hunter knows exactly where he stands on bidding and quoting, right?
Well, maybe not. Let's visit an auction in Gower Street, Kensington, last Saturday afternoon. Biggin and Scott were selling No. 48 and quoting a price range of $100,000 - "between $630,000 and $730,000".
Auctioneer David Thiessen (pictured) bounced out and called for bids. Nothing. Called again for bids. Nothing. So he put in a vendor bid of $650,000. Darn it, still nothing. Thiessen checked with the owner, reappeared and upped his own bid by $20,000. The bid without a bidder was now $670,000. A ripple of amused disbelief went through the crowd. Not surprisingly, the folk who didn't want to bid at 650 still didn't want to put up a hand at 670.
Property passed in. Result appeared on Monday but it said the reserve was $720,000. Question: if the owner did not want to sell under $720,000 why put in a bid for him at $650,000?
B&S's Joe Ferrara told Diary the bid was just to get a "sort of a roll going". Auctioneer Thiessen told us: "The vendor wouldn't give us a reserve price until after the auction. I usually put in one vendor bid only but on this occasion he wanted us to move closer to $700,000."
So now the price for potential buyers is $90,000 more than the estimated low - without one person making a bid. Yep, the system's working beautifully.
Author: By Lawrence Money
Date: April 16, 2008
Publication: The Age - Domain
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment