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Most auction houses refuse to do Mimimum bids or Reserve auctions. Boo Hoo if the item doesn't sell. Most major auctions have a million in sales per auction. So what if one item doesn't sell. They make money either way whether your item sells for $10 or $10,000. Their interest is in protecting their butt and not the consignor's.
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I don't refuse to do them. I strongly advise against them. I've got ten years of empirical proof that shows that items with reserves do worse than items without, and items with higher opening bids get less action than items with lower ones.
I did a customer survey a few years ago, and one of the questions dealt with reserves. 50% of the people surveyed WILL NOT BID if there's a reserve. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how the reserve works, doesn't matter how transparent it is. They won't bid. The people I surveyed were my actual auction bidders.
To see if it was true, I put a card of my own in one of my auctions. It was a $12,000 card. I put an $8,000 reserve. I opened the card at $2,000. Bidding stopped at $5,000, and it did not meet the reserve.
Two auctions later, I listed the exact same card, with the exact description, the exact layout in the catalog, and the exact same opening bid. No reserve. Card sold for $15,000.
My job isn't to protect my butt. My job is to work as hard as I can to get the highest price possible for my consignors, to advise them and counsel them as to the best way to sell their material, and to earn their trust through the quality of my company's performance. My job is to make sure that my consignors never question the amount of effort I put in to selling their items, and to present an auction that can get bidders excited. Every time something sells for less than expected, it reflects on my company. Every time something sells for more, it does as well. In no other industry I can think of are companies so intensely scrutinized and judged with each and every transaction. In that environment, protecting my butt is the least of my concerns.
Most of the time, when I run an item with a reserve, it doesn't meet the reserve. That doesn't help my consignors, and it doesn't get bidders excited.
This is a good thread. There are a lot of good questions in it. A lot of them are hard to answer in writing, I think, but I'd certainly be happy to sit and do an in-person Q&A with a group - maybe at the national?
-Al