What’s Stopping You From Bidding On That Chair?

It would end in ruin: I had found a set of five UFO lamps from the auction of David Lynch’s estate in Los Angeles. The bidding had been wild, tchotchkes selling for well over the high estimate. Finally, my lamps appeared on the auction block, seemingly stuck at the opening bid of $300. I bid via the LiveAuctioneers app. The bid did not register. I bid again. The trap sprang closed—I had won the lot for a bid of $4,000 that I had never submitted. When, in the following days, I retrieved the bid log from LiveAuctioneers, it appears that some Wi-Fi latency problem in tandem with a stray opening floor bid of $3,000 had, in a matter of about one single second, led to my submitting a bid ten times higher than what I intended. A representative of the auction house has been curt and unyielding. (The Roman emperor Caligula allegedly weaponized auctions by having his auctioneer take endless bids from a sleeping man—I know the feeling.) Arbitration looms. And yet still, I heed the auction call.

As a dealer and an auction scout (I send out a weekly report, The Arcades, of the best items coming to auction), I watch auctions closely. It’s an open secret that many of the design pieces you see showcased in design magazines (and, in fact, design stores) have passed through an auction at some point. You yourself may have poked around on LiveAuctioneers or Invaluable, the online auction aggregators whose simple interface has upended what was once a confusing patchwork of small, local auctions. But you still haven’t pulled the trigger. I submit that maybe you should. Here’s how it works.

Auctions are generally a simpler way of liquidating property, often coming as a result of one of the "three D’s"—death, divorce, and debt. (If you’ve ever moved, or cleaned out the home of someone who’s died, the feeling of "what exactly am I supposed to do with this?" is probably already familiar.) So it all goes to auction, and what the seller loses in possible resale value, you, the buyer, gains as an auction steal.

In most cases, the inventory at auction is consigned. The auctioneer is effectively a sales agent working on behalf of the seller, with a legal and financial responsibility to get the consignor the highest price possible. Before you even bid, it’s important to understand that the price you pay is more complicated than what you see when the hammer falls. For their services, auctioneers can be compensated with a variety of fees, but the premium (a set percentage of the hammer price—the winning bid) is the official fee that you pay to the auctioneer for their services when you win something. Premiums range from roughly 18 percent at a local estate sale auction up to 33 percent—they are no joke, and they are rising. The sale is also taxable, so you’re liable for sales tax, and are now often also liable for platform fees if you use a third-party platform like LiveAuctioneers or Invaluable. (Small, local auction houses are often mom-and-pop operations that are running on tight margins, so let’s not begrudge the fees, but it can be a shock to get an invoice that’s 40 percent higher than the hammer price.) If you want to get a deal at auction, crunch the numbers before you bid.

If you’ve found that perfect sofa and are ready to take the plunge, the next step is to register. It’s usually a formality—you’ll be approved to bid up to a certain amount (usually less than $10,000 until you establish a track record of paying invoices—you can call if you need it to be higher) and now it’s time to play.

Auctions are the churn of our time’s material culture—they bring objects of singular beauty and rarity from the depths of the private collection to the surface.

An auction is a game. A lot comes to the auction block and its auctioneer accepts bids, having already set both a starting bid (establishing a price floor), an estimate (what they think it will sell for), and the bidding increments (bid increments rise with the price—at Christie’s, it’s $100 up to $2,000 and all the way up to $10,000 above $100,000). These days, online and phone bids are more common than in-person bidding, with online bidding also allowing for automated bidding (like eBay), where you can submit a bid and then allow the system to handle the actual live bidding. It is, again, a game, so there are different strategies—some people never pre-bid because they don’t want to drive up the price in advance, while others wait for the bidding to quiet before they pounce (going once, going twice…). What the consignor and auctioneer want is a bidding war—bidders dead set on taking the lot whose competitive drive (clock ticking in the background) leads them to budget-blowing exuberance. To be clear, that happens all the time. The auctioneer’s job is, in some sense, to make that happen. If you could hear the oddly personal expletive-laden invective coming out of my mouth during some online auctions, you would be concerned. But if you were a bidder, you’d get it—passions run high when you must have that postmodern lamp, or Chinese snuff bottle, or questionably-attributed Loetz glass!

If you do win at auction, the next step is to pay out your invoice and arrange for shipping. This is often a stumbling block. It’s often said that auctions are like a wholesale purchase, rather than a retail purchase: you do not get the hand-holding of buying from a store. Once you buy the thing, you’re on your own, though virtually all auction houses will tell you whether they can either pack-and-ship your item (a great, affordable, not-widely-known service offered by UPS) or move it for you. There are no returns or exchanges. Auction houses indemnify themselves pretty much completely—even where there’s a discrepancy between photo and catalogue description, you’re out of luck. Or, in my case, when the Wi-Fi breaks. (For the record, the description is what matters, not the photo.) That means, again, do your research. Ask for more pictures, more info, condition reports, etc. Because once it’s yours, it’s yours.

So—should you in fact buy stuff at auction? My answer is an enthusiastic yes. Auctions are the churn of our time’s material culture—they bring objects of singular beauty and rarity from the depths of the private collection to the surface, offering exceptional value to those buyers who are willing to put in the legwork. Like me, you can and will get burned at auction. But this is all a part of your initiation as you take your place in the great cosmic wheel of collecting. Auctions are a great reminder that in some profound sense, we only rent and never own. So, in this brief beautiful moment we call life, lock horns, bid, and finally bring that sofa home.

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