Brian Unthank Real Estate

Reviews

• ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
  I attended a farm clearance and collectibles auction today held by Brian Unthank Real Estate, and was quite unimpressed with a number of things related to how the auction was conducted. I won 7 different lots, and methodically wrote down the price I paid in my notes after each winning bid. When I went to pay at the end, for 3 out of 7 auctions the amount recorded on my invoice was higher than my actual winning bid as I had recorded it. These were only small amounts of money, such as $10 invoiced for an item knocked down to me for $5 as the only bidder, however I was nonetheless concerned that this could happen more than once. When I queried two of these the difference was refunded to me which is to their credit, and I only noticed the third after I had already walked away so I didn't bother arguing. I assume they would have done the right thing if I had raised it, but I did wonder if i'd been unlucky or if others may have been overcharged for items and in some cases perhaps not realised. The older Auctioneer (Brian Unthank) also later appeared to take imaginary bids "from the tree". There was one item (a lamp) where he called bids of $200, $210, then $215, then after looking for another bid passed the item in. A couple of people queried who was actually bidding the first three bids but nothing was said, and the auction was just quickly moved on. I'm prepared to accept it may have been a case of not meeting a reserve, but no-one spoke up that they had been bidding when those in the crowd asked, and I did not hear any mention of a reserve prior to the lot being auctioned. It appeared to me, rightly or wrongly, that the auctioneer has manufactured bids to drive the price up and had been caught out when getting no real bids. Other attendees seemed to be of the same impression. Later when the younger of the two auctioneers (Tom?) was conducting the auction, Brian decided that a couple of the items weren't going high enough so he bought them himself. Given Brian was not in effective control of the auction at that point this might be a legitimate practice, but it seemed a bit odd to me for the auctioneer taking a break to be bidding on items himself. Finally, with around 150 lots to go in the catalouged part of the auction, the vendor apparently told the auctioneers that he didn't think things were selling for high enough prices. So they simply called the auction off and said "if you want anything else you will need to go and negotiate with the vendor, because we aren't going to go selling things too cheap". With all the different people still wanting things, the multiple impromptu negotiations that ensued all seemed very unorganized, and I gave up without buying anything else. Ending the auction with approx 1/4 of the items still to go under the hammer is I assume well within the rights of the vendor, but was very disappointing to me as many of the items in this 150 or so lots were the ones I had been most interested in.
  By Matthew Cummins, February 26, 2017

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