Heritage Auctions - Boston Garters

[jayshum]

Originally Posted by dariushou

If I were Powell, I'd be livid. In my own personal opinion, he should be the winner and Heritage needs to make it right with the cosigner and the individual bidders....whatever that means. Heritage has over $1Bn in revenues and this is just unacceptable. I don’t want to throw around negligence, but damn, it’s bonkers that a company of their magnitude and presence could make such a disastrous mistake. There’s a good reason they aren’t public… The mistake should never have happened...period. Again, I’d be livid.

With that said, Heritage, of course has crafted their T&C with some outs. The easiest out is the idiotic clause about any disagreement can be settled by Heritage and redoing the auction – someone quoted it earlier…I can’t find it.



The above quote, which I presume is from the actual auction, has holes all in it and after reading it a few times I’m kind of at odds to what it exactly says. What is a winning bid? Well, if you read through the rest of the terms, I’m led to believe it means you were the winner of the auction. So, does that mean you take the winners of the set (won the auction—1 winner) and compare it to the winner of the individual lots (12 winners) – So you could have 13 people who think they won the auction when they went to bed and only after someone from heritage wakes up the next day and does the comparison declares the winner? I’ve read a bunch of convoluted docs in my time, but I really don’t know with much certainty what exactly that paragraph says to be honest. If my statement above is correct (comparing the winners after the fact), then I would say no one bidding on that auction thought it worked that way and it shouldn’t. We all know how it should work…why Heritage screwed the pooch so bad is just bizarro world. Seriously. No excuses are acceptable to anyone who participated in those auctions or anyone who uses Heritage or thinking of using them.

In the end, I hope they do the right thing and everyone is made hole in some way. I stated my view which is Powell deserves the win here. just sucks how it was done.

-Darius

I don't think the wording was the problem. The software for their auction platform was not able to handle an auction setup like this. It's hard to believe an AH the size of Heritage wouldn't have tested their platform to make sure it could, but apparently they didn't.

[dariushou]

Originally Posted by jayshum

I don't think the wording was the problem. The software for their auction platform was not able to handle an auction setup like this. It's hard to believe an AH the size of Heritage wouldn't have tested their platform to make sure it could, but apparently they didn't.

The wording wasn't the problem because no one in their right mind thought it would work the way it did. The software wasn't the problem. It was the setup that was the problem (heritage problem). The wording like most of the time was insufficient in my opinion, but not the problem...but will be one of the factors the courts look too...if it gets that far.