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Surprisingly, with all of the talk on the board about high shipping costs, very little has been mentioned about the 25% BP, which, as far as I know, is the highest ever charged for a sports memorabilia auction. Their catalogue indicates that the 25% BP is their new policy going forward for all of their auctions. I'm not sure how that compares to their other auction line markets such as artwork, real estate, etc. so I can't speak to that.

My take on that aspect is that the high BP really doesn't effect the bidders/buyers in the auction, but instead, the consignor(s). In order to compensate for the extra 5% or so BP, the bidder just goes 5% lower on their bid, same bottom line, bid amount + BP. Thus, the consignor(s) lose that 5% from their net payout as the amount is moved from final bid amount to BP (i.e.-the auction house).

In this case, the way I understand it, the Baseball Museum was the only consignor of all items in the auction so none of us on the board (or anyone else) lost that extra 5% above the more traditional 20% BP range. Furthermore, it is my guess that the Baseball Museum shopped their consignment around to various sale avenues and certainly would be offered not only 0% consignment fee, but a portion of the BP as well. Maybe the agreement was somewhere between 5% back and 10% back so, in order to achieve a similar bottom-line as other sports AH's, Christie's then had to charge the 25% BP.

For this reason, I don't see this one case as an opportunity for other sports AH's to start pushing up their BP's towards that 25% level, at least not any time in the foreseeable future, in my opinion.