Beware of unscrupulous and incompetent auctioneers

If you have landed on this page, then you might be considering an auctioneer to handle an online auction for your estate sale.

I lost a lot of time, money, and sanity dealing with one of these people, so I have set up this site simply to give you some guidelines to help you avoid making the same mistakes I did.

If you are thinking of entering into a contract for someone to handle the auctioning of your estate, make sure that you do the following:

Get absolutely ***everything*** in writing.
- Beware of promises made outside of the contract. These are meaningless. An unscrupulous auctioneer will tell you anything to get you to sign with them.
  - They may make verbal, and even email and text promises to get you to sign with them. But some auctioneers will not hesitate to break these promises.
  - The potential auctioneer or auctioneering company may seem very friendly. You want to like the auctioneer you go with, but do not base your decision on a seeming “connection”. They may take advantage of your mental state in dealing with a recent death.
  - Beware of assurances that if anything doesn’t look right, they’ll make it right, and that you of course have nothing to worry about if things don’t go well at auction.
  - Beware of promises that they’ll buy items themselves to keep your property from selling too cheaply. This is illegal, but they may promise this to you anyway.
  - Beware of specific promises, such as their assurance that they’ll get your coins graded or your jewelry appraised. If it’s not in the contract, don’t count on it.
  - Find out how they will advertise the auction, and get that info into the contract
  - Add specific dates and time periods to the contract: Date by which auction will run, date by which auction will finish, duration of auction, when you will get paid after auction is complete, etc.
  - Add guarantees as to value where appropriate. E.g. Coins will not be listed or sold below melt value, etc.. Set minimums for any items you like. If they don’t like it, walk.
  - Do not take their word for anything. Whether these promises are verbal, text, or email – if they are not in the contract, they mean nothing.
Require references, and call them!
- Do not take their word assuring you that they do this all the time. Require reference accounts specific to your sale (e.g. if you’re selling jewelry, request a reference to someone who has sold jewelry from their estate).
Do an online search for the company and auctioneers
- If they have successfully run auctions, then these should be available. Failure to find anything is a big red flag
Record all conversations with them, including both in-person and phone conversations
- There are numerous apps that will record both ends of your phone conversations
- If they have a problem with being recorded, walk away
Make sure the contract includes a right to review the auction prior to going live, and to terminate the contract if you are not satisfied for any reason with the way the auction is set up.
- If the auctioneer fails to set up a valid online auction with good photos, you may have no right to terminate the auction unless you include this in the contract. Or, you might just not feel right about what they’re doing. Make sure you have a valid way out.
Do not let them take any of your property with them, under any circumstances.
- Under no circumstances should you let them hold your property or remove it from your premises. Don’t let them take jewelry, coins, or other small items with them to take pictures, don’t let them take your valuable property away for “safekeeping”. They can steal, swap, or hold your property hostage indefinitely if anything goes wrong on their end – and it definitely can.
Very carefully verify any online auction of your property before it goes live, and exercise your right to terminate the contract for any reason before the auction begins.
- You may find out that the auctioneers are amateurs, computer illiterate, listing your property on bad sites, mixing up your listings, etc… If they make mistakes on your auction, this can result in severe losses to you and no penalty to them. They may blame their mistakes on everything but themselves.
- Don’t trust them to take good photos of your items. Just because an auctioneer has a camera and a lightbox doesn’t meant they know what they are doing.
Verify in writing that they are not just selling to their friends and themselves.
- You will lose in this deal every time.
Make sure they are listing your goods on a respected large website with a very large number of bidders.
- Few bidders equals low prices
Exercise your right to refusal if you don’t like what they’re doing.
- Don’t just walk, run away.
Be very specific about the costs to you of terminating the contract.
- Do not allow vague numbers about “expenses”, or percentage of value of your property. Be specific.
Do NOT agree to bear all cost of any legal action resulting from their failures or disagreements with you about the auction
- Hopefully you won’t get to this point, since you have written exit clauses into the contract.
- If you do agree to pay fees, then this can result in your having to pay for their unauthorized legal fees because they botched an auction, or just because they don’t agree with you and decide to run to a lawyer for advice

Many of these may seem obvious to you. They do to me now too. I made many mistakes in trusting someone, who turned out to be both dishonest and incompetent. It’s easy to make these mistakes when dealing with an Estate. There is an emotional component that can affect your decision-making after a death in the family. So, just be careful out there.

Trust me, It is very likely you can handle an online auction better on your own. It’s a pain, but believe me, it’s much less of a pain than dealing with a shoddy auctioneer who mishandles your estate.

Sponsored by: United States Bidder’s Advocates