its not the auction houses fault its the bidders

[egbeachley]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Jerry - your point could be well taken, but you are missing something critical.

Suppose a card has a fair market value of $2000 and it is sitting at $1400 late on the final night. The auction house then places the next bid of $1500. Sure, they run the risk of buying it, but at that level they may be glad to do so.

I think with some auction houses the policy is they will not let anything go cheap, even if they have to buy it themselves. And had they won that $2000 card for the $1500 bid, they would just hang onto it for a bit and resell it for a profit down the road. So they really risked nothing.

I guess we can remove that last sentence. Didn't work so well for H&S.