Antiques Road Show

Antique Auctions Online – They’re Here and They’re the Future

More people are turning to Antique Auctions Online than ever before. It’s true. The rarefied world of the Antiques auction house where the well-heeled would come by not only to Buy Antiques, but also to see and be seen is starting to become a thing of the past as fewer people have time, more people become interested in antiques (thank you Antiques Road Show), and more and more people realize that there are bargains to be had at online auctions.

But rest assured, the major houses are in no danger of disappearing. The multi-million dollar Matisse or the rare Rembrandt up for sale will always be the province of the traditional auction house, at least for the foreseeable future. However, for the more “run of the mill” antiques, the sort of things that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, the future is here and it’s called online auctions.

Not Your Son’s Online Auction

You know the old joke about it being “not your father’s Oldsmobile,” well this is not your son’s online auction. We know there are all kinds of new schemes out there for online auctions (and we use that term in the American sense of the word – meaning something a bit unsavory, not in the British sense meaning a way of doing things).

eBay is so last year. These days, the biggest deals in online auctions are those sites where you pay for the right to bid and each bid raises the price by a penny and extends the bidding by 15 minutes. Meaning you might score an iPad for $22 but you’ll still spend $300 for each of the 20 $15 charges to bid.

However, while your kids might find such bidding interesting and almost like a game, this is, as we said, not your son’s online auction. Instead, we’re talking about real, honest to goodness auctions conducted live, with a real auctioneer, a real gavel, and real antiques for sale. And if there is an iPad for sale, it’s there because it’s part of an estate and not because it’s part of a gimmick that the auction house has come up with to make money.

Conducted by Well Respected Auction Houses

While there will always be the fly by night operations, both in the antique auctions online business and in the more traditional antiques auction business, most of the better known online auction houses have been doing business for a number of years already and understand the needs of the professional and hobbyist antiques collector.

They are able to provide as much detail about an object as any traditional auction house will provide and where appropriate, will provide you with the provenance and any story behind a particular object if appropriate. In fact, many, though not all, of the houses that offer antique auctions online either also run a traditional auction house or are staffed by people who are veterans of the traditional auction scene and who can make the online auction just as interesting and exciting as any traditional auction you may have had to drive miles to get to.

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