Yesterday, Vero’s family and I went to a public auction run by Tru Liquidators. Vero and I have our eye on a few items for the house and wanted to see how an auction was run.
All in all, I was quite impressed.
It started out with a preview hour from 12-1PM. That wasn’t entirely exciting. We were expecting a lot more stock in the showroom, but in hindsight, an auction would take days if they had a warehouse full of stuff.
There literally is THAT auctioneer who rambles on some prices…”Do I have fifty, fifty, fifty, blah blah blah, how about forty, forty, forty?”. It was interesting to see him at work. They start out at a high price, then it drops, drops, drops, and then when people start bidding, it comes back up to a reasonable price in most cases.
From our viewpoint, 90% of the stuff sold was a good deal. There were three piece leather sofa sets selling for $1,000. There was also a 65” Panasonic TV that sold for $1,700. While I didn’t think it was a great deal, I checked Future Shop and they lowest price they have for a Panasonic of this size is $3,000. So that’s pretty good savings!
I also liked how sometimes they had multiple sets of an item so if the knife set was won at $30 they ask if anyone else wants a set at that price? In fact, a sofa set went for $2,000 but then they had three more that they didn’t want to bring back to Toronto so they dropped the price to $1,500! All were snatched up.
There’s a 10% buyers premium and I’m wondering if you have to pay taxes on the item as well. But all in all, we were impressed of how it played out…not ENTIRELY impressed with the selection. The only thing that piqued our curiosity was the sofa sets but we don’t know if we’ll like leather.