Auction a bust

Well, Joel and I went to the house auction last night, but it was a bust - out of 14 couples who went through the house on the Open House day, for the longest time I was the only one who came back, and in the end, there were a whole bunch of people looking to watch, including a couple of people who are thinking of selling their home by auction instead of realtor, but nobody came out to bid.

It wasn't a complete waste of time, however, as Joel and I got to spend a bit of time together chatting about our latest advancements in knowledge and findings on the whole Passive Income topic, and we got to meet the Auctioneer and his helper and chat with both of them for about 45 minutes, too. But we didn't get to see the auctioning process this time.

I'll keep an eye out for the next auction coming up, as this is only the 8th attempted in our area. I think this particular house had some basic problems with it locationwise and that's what ultimately happened to defeat the auctioning process. The physical house itself is nice, and the neighborhood is great, but it's too far from city centre and has a highway very close so despite physical barriers built to reduce the sound, you can still hear the traffic screaming by at 110kph.

At any rate, while talking to the Auctioneer, one of my very first questions to him was why someone would choose to auction their house vs sell it through a realtor, and the answer made a lot of sense on both the buyer and seller's sides in terms of actual process of buying or selling a home. Looking back, however - I have some more questions I wish I would have asked last night, surrounding things that Realtors and that process of buying a home help you take care of which are left for the buyer to handle in this process. I feel that this time around I was mainly being a 'friendly' in gathering information, avoiding potentially difficult questions which require me to remain comfortable while someone else becomes uncomfortable. As I get more confident in myself I will not worry so much about being 'friendly' (avoiding the hard questions), and put more emphasis on tact (diplomatically asking for the important but difficult answers).

Some reasons you as a seller would auction your home:

• More specific sale timeline. Seller specifies the Open House days, and all parties interested in reviewing the property review it then. Auction date is set and all bids come in on that date. Ultimate possession date can be defined at the same time as the Open House and auction.
• Taps into the innate nature of competition for the seller - the buyer doesn't have to be involved in accepting or denying bids once they have set their "reserve price" (minimum acceptable price) for the property with the Auctioneer. They just sit back and watch the Auctioneer work with the buyers.

Main reason as a buyer you'd get a home at an auction:

• You know who your competition is and exactly how much they're bidding. In a competitive buying market when you've been out-bid on 3-5 homes already or watched someone else who has, the auction process is refreshingly open in comparison

All in all it was a good night, didn't suck up all the time we had that night for relaxing, etc, and the conversation was great with the Auctioneer and his assistant. It turns out the Auctioneer grew up 10 km from where Joel grew up... and the assistant had played hockey in high school against Joel's older brothers!

Small world!

Jill