Auctions?

[mathiverse]

I recently read "How to Survive Without a Salary" by Charles Long and he spends a chapter describing auctions. Anyone have experience going to in person, live auctions for bargains in this day and age? That book was written a while back, so I wonder if the scene has changed beyond the obvious fact many auctions occur online these days.

[Gilberto de Piento]

I know this isn't what you are looking for but I'll tell my auction story anyway. In the early 2000s a car guy neighbor had an auction to sell off 90% of his belongings to move to another part of the country. I went to the auction thinking about buying his Craftsman toolbox. It was a current model in used condition, nothing special. The toolbox got bid up to more than it cost new at Sears! I've never been to another auction.

[mathiverse]

Ha! That was mentioned as one of the pitfalls of auctions. In the aforementioned book, Long emphasizes knowing what a good deal is and having explicit price limits for each item you are looking for so that you know it's a bargain if you get it. Even beyond knowing what a good deal is, Long said it's easy to get caught up in the intensity during the bidding and end up paying way too much if you're not careful!

[Dream of Freedom]

Many moons ago, when I bought my house, I went to an auction and bought a washer and dryer for $100 total, an electric mower for $25, and a box of cutting boards and kitchen towels for... I want to say $2, but I honestly don't remember. Anyways, though you can get good deals and I think that they are great for when you are making major life changes, it takes quite a bit of time to go through the merchandise and sit through the auction so if you aren't looking for much stuff I wouldn't bother as it is a time sink otherwise.

[Slevin]

My neighbor / basically my brother growing up had an uncle that ran auctions for a living up in the mountains, and sometimes I would go up and watch or work the auction (move stuff around).

Regular attendees were resellers who frequent these and jump on the items they know how to make a buck on, etc, but they want to have the margins big enough to make it worth their while, and had the physical constraint issue of one trailer or whatnot, so they would only take a certain size of thing if it would make enough $ on the margins. If you want to go a bit above their margins, then I think you can still get things for a decent % off the normal used market, etc, and also there are plenty of things not worth the resell (too big, too weird, just not the kind of stuff that it is easy to sell) that might be really valuable to you. Also, there is just a wild wild amount of variance between auctions, so as @Dream of Freedom said, its mostly worth it if you need a lot of stuff, or you have a lot of free time to kill.

But take all this with a grain of salt because I haven't been in twelve years or so, so the general operation may have changed somewhat. Probably not as much for the mountain towns, since the local populations aren't that big or that technological, but who knows.

[aptruncata]

Went to couple trustee sale/real estate auctions to purchase a second home in 2017-2018.
All of them went above and beyond comparable market listing, 1/3 of them had either a disgruntled tenants or long term squatters which came with the property and 1/4 were not viewable inside sold as-is or as-shown from the front yard.
This was in southern california.

[chenda]

I used to work for an auctioneers. I agree with what others say, it's a good place to buy and sell quirky stuff which doesn't easily sell on mainstream platforms. We sold random bits of land, garages, derilict property, refurbs and loads of odd stuff.

If you're going to bid I recommend you watch a few live auctions first so you get the feel of them and the style of the auctioneer.