AH Blues

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by sb1

Peter,

I think it would be an uphill battle for anyone trying to go that route at this point in time.

The buyer is the end consumer and would be happy to pay no fee, but the consignor/seller would not be so willing to pay 10% off the top when he could call the next guy and pay nothing. So again no consignments, no auction. It would take the majority of AH's making this change all at once to make this even plausible, and then one gets short of material and they are back to offering Zero consignor fees. Today's setup is just free market working it's way in the sports AH world.

I might add that the only way you would be able to garner more seller interest in having a consignor fee would be the premise of a bigger payout due to the AH being able to get more money for the client, which is where many/most of the problems of the AH's began with trying to get higher prices than their competitors, which in fact were not always legit sales/bids as we now know.

I don't get it. Any knowledgeable consignor would realize he is going to do better with (using my example) the AH getting a total of 10 percent of the take than with the AH getting 20, regardless of the semantics. It's just the flip side of the buyer's calculus. Even with no seller's fee the consignor isn't paying nothing, he is paying in the form of a reduced hammer price due to BP.