After nearly two years buying at auctions, the speaker has learned that plastic storage bins can spark fierce bidding wars while expected hits flop. They furnished their son's entire college apartment through auctions and share why sellers should write great descriptions, take good photos, and bundle related items together.
Will people buy my stuff? Okay, here's the craziest thing I've learned in my almost 2 years of auction life. People will bid and fight over the strangest things, and then the item that you think is the queen bee— what, what a catch, everybody's going to want this— and nobody bids on it. I'm just flabbergasted. We just closed an auction where one of the hottest items was plastic storage bins. Now, I don't know why the buyers out there, because it was more than one person. They were fighting over these storage bins. And I'm watching the auction with my seller, and she's saying, what is going on? And I said, girl, I don't know, because you just never know which items are going to catch the eye of someone. Now, it could be because they refinish furniture for a living, they're going to repurpose something. It could be that they have a collection and this fits the collection perfectly. It could be that you called them while they were getting on Amazon to buy something. They said, oh, oh, I can get it for less than sticker price on a brand new one. Because at the end of the day, most items that are sold at auction are going to have a little bit of an advantage when it comes to a discount. They might not, and they don't always, but a lot of times you can find some really good deals. I'll just tell y'all right now, this is part of how we furnished most of our son's apartment when he went off to college, was shopping the items at a very reputable auction house's website and You should also know this in auction world, at least in my 2 years of experience, the fellow auctioneers in the area, just the best group of people I may have ever met. I love shopping from them. They're shopping from me. We can make sure that we're providing the best possible experience to the consumer. Love it. It's amazing. So I will shop at other auction houses and I know they'll shop at mine too. So when you're bringing me your items or when I come to look at your items, What we're going to figure out is how do we position this so that somebody will want it? And that's got to do with the descriptions and the photos, of course. But it also means if you have a bunch of picture frames and you have one really cool mirror, we might put it all together in what's called a lot. And that would mean somebody buys the whole kit and caboodle. So you don't want those frames. You didn't want to throw them away because why would you put them in the landfill? But that mirror is crazy cool.
