As we were searching for the links for our coverage of the KAA Winter Convention, we were surprised by the almost-complete lack of designations listed with each auctioneer on his or her respective staff pages. While it’s possible that all of the auctioneers for whom we were searching simply didn’t have any designations, we think it’s more likely that those auctioneers who had designations simply didn’t have them listed. Listing an auctioneer’s designations next to his name on every piece of marketing material as well as the website is an important pieces of a holistic institutional marketing campaign.

While many auctioneers use the basic education found at an auction school and are happy conducting business indefinitely based solely on those fundamentals, more and more auctioneers are realizing the importance of continuing education to ensure that their businesses are using modern business practices.

There are currently seven professional designation courses offered by the National Auctioneers Association institute. These designations prove to prospective buyers and sellers that an auctioneer has continued to learn and improve his processes.

CAI – Certified Auctioneers Institute

AARE- Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate

ATS – Auction Technology Specialist

BAS – Benefit Auction Specialist

CES – Certified Estate Specialist

GPPA- Graduate Personal Property Appraiser

MPPA – Master Personal Property Appraiser

We covered the new ATS designation back in November. We’ll be covering each of the remaining designations in the next couple of months, concluding with an article on CAI in March.

Kurt Aumann, CAI, ATS

Joining me today for the fourth in the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Kurt Aumann, CAI, ATS. Kurt is an auctioneer for Aumann Auctions from Nokomis, Illinois, and is currently the Vice Chairman of the National Auctioneers Association Education Institute Trustees.

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Wednesday 28 January 2009. Auctioneertech.com. Technology, auctions and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

AuctioneerTech: Hello and welcome to the fifteenth episode of the Auction Podcast from the AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the fourth if our ActioneerTech.com interview series is my friend Kurt Aumann, CAI, ATS. Kurt is an auctioneer for Aumann Auctions from Nokomis, Illinois, and is currently the Vice Chairman of the National Auctioneers Association Education Institute Trustees. Good evening, Kurt, and thank you for joining me.

Kurt Aumann: Well thanks for the invite and I’ve been looking forward to this.

AT: We are trying something new this episode and we will try and do it in the future, but we are streaming this live, the recording anyway, from auctioneertech.com, so if you’re listening to this in the recorded version, know that if you pay attention to the website in the future you’ll be able to watch us recording these live. Back to the questioning, Kurt, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be an auctioneer.

KA: Well I grew up in the business and went to auction school at the tender age of 12, so I have been in it my entire life. My dad started a business and it was, I would say a small local business – maybe county wide. And there were a lot of household and state auctions and so on and so forth. After I got out of school, I decided that maybe that universe just wasn’t quite big enough for me so we started focusing the business more on some niche markets. Things have grown since, so it’s been a good ride.

What is Aumann Auctions today and what kind of stuff specifically do you sell?

Well, we have a staff of about a half a dozen auctioneers and we’ve got 16 members of our support staff and we followed several niches, you know, throughout the company – throughout the evolution of the company. We have some things that we don’t sell anymore. Things we’re active in right now are the toy market, the petroliana market – the signs and the gas pumps, gas globes – we do a tremendous amount of business with antique tractors and actually do that world wide. Lately we’ve been getting into intellectual property, selling existing business as on going entities, and some commercial liquidations and of course real estate with the focus on farmland.

Aumann Auctions is one of many members of the MarkNet Alliance. You were involved, I believe, in the creation of that franchise. What is MarkNet Alliance and why did you build it?

Well, it’s legally a franchise, but frankly we operate more like a coop. kind of like the old farmers coop elevator, and it allows us to service national contracts, that we wouldn’t normally have a chance of service on an individual basis. That really creates a distribution network that we can use and it’s allowed many of us to really book some business and do some business that we wouldn’t normally have gotten a chance to do. It’s a best practices group. We share ideas and our resources and a lot of partnerships on different deals form. It’s a little hard to describe in just a few minutes, but it’s been a fantastic experience and we’ve got a really, really great group of guys that are in it and I really look forward anything that I do with MarkNet.

I was teaching the ATS course this last November in Baltimore and we were demonstrating different website technologies when incidentally went to your website and was demonstrating that, among others, when I discovered your Streamline Bid system. What is that and what does that do for you that other existing products do not?

Well, it’s actually it’s an online bidding system like many of them that are out there. The only difference is that it’s integrated into a piece of backend software. So it’s also integrated in the project management and task list and managerial over sight. It’s a piece of a much larger piece of software that serves a function of live capturing and conducting oline auctions.

We delayed the recording of this episode by a few days because you had this big auction that you mentioned earlier a couple of days ago that you’ve been working on for a while. Tell me a little bit about the propriety and kind of how you handled the event and how it went.

Well, actually I have to give MarkNet a part of the credit for this deal because it certainly helped us win the contract, at least that’s what the sellers told us. It was a project of selling an estate and was 3900 acres, almost 4000, and it was all high quality, highly productive farmland, over 99% tilable, and it was over 1600 acres that was contiguous which is very unusual in our part of the world. I know you get out in your country, Aaron, out in Kansas it’s not so unusual, but whenever the farms back here – there’s a lot of farms broken up in forties, eighties and in 160s, so to get 1600 acres contiguous is a pretty big feat. We broke the farm up into 43 different tracks and offered it in a multi-parcel method. The auction took just a little over 6 hours and it brought 24 million dollars. So it was a great day.

I assume you had some help from your MarkNet partners in the actual conducting of that auction – or was it handled exclusively with Aumann Auction staff?

Well, we had all of our staff there, but there were also a lot of MarkNet members that came in and worked the floor. I’ve gotta tell you that I had the likes of Troy Crowe and Bryce Hansen and Brian Beckort and J.J. Dower and Chris Pracht, Joe Burns. I had a team on the floor. As you know on the multiparcel method sale, those floor guys are the ones that make the money, and explain the process and the bidding methods to those bidders and it was a sight to see. It really was, ’cause I mean those guys were just all all-stars and it came off very smoothly. I gotta tell you, and it’s not just because I did the project, but I don’t think we left a dime on the table.

Wow. That was actually the term I was gonna use in describing that crew of auctioneer you just named was all-stars. It sounds like a great team that anybody would be pretty lucky to have on site at an event. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t know for certain that I’ve covered it or that I’ve discussed it a whole lot with any of my guests up to this point. Would you, if you wouldn’t mind, briefly kind of describe what the multipar auction method is, how it works and what kind of software, if any, you used for this event?

The method is actually, in my opinion, the absolute fairest way to sell a piece of real estate because it allows the small tract buyer to bid at the same time with a large tract buyer by allowing the auction to proceed by the cumulative total, not by the individual track price. So in other words, three small tract buyers, the total of the bids for three small tract buyers, as long as they exceed the bid of the large tract buyer, then that’s how the propriety sells. So it gives the bidder the freedom to put together any combination of tracts he wants to put together. So it sounds a little confusing when you see it. I always tell people that the best way to understand it is to just place a bid. You start to understand the process really quickly then.

So did your propriety sell – how many buyers were winners on your propriety and was it broken up or was is pretty big chunks that were bought and how long did the auction take?

Auction took six hours and we actually had 10 buyers, although one of the buyers was a consortium of farmers that elected to bid collectively. So that was the largest bid up on the board which was around $15.5 million and that was about 2,400 acres and 2,400 acres ended up being divided, I think, 16 times, maybe, something like that. So there were 16 people in that consortium.

What technology tools did you use during the sale and in a normal course of multi-par?

Of course we used a piece of multipar software that we’ve modified a little and came off well. Probably the neatest thing we did that we got the most comments on was we really made it a multimedia event; we had a lot of screens. We had video coverage throughout the room and of course we had alternate screens between different bid boards so people can get any kind of information they wanted at any time. It really came off well; it looked like a multiplex theater.

Well certainly congratulations on it, I heard nothing but good things both from you and from other people around you that I’ve talked to since you conducted the event. It sounds like it was done very well and very professionally. You are based there in Nokomis Illinois, a bustling metropolis of a couple thousand people.

Actually downtown Nokomis

Downtown Nokomis. Little smoggier down there than it is elsewhere?

That’s right, that’s right. I mean I just wanted to draw that distinction.

Well, there were you are, about an hour and a half I think northeast of Saint Louis, as an auctioneer of some more specialty kinds of items – you mentioned the petroliana and the toy market and the antique tractor market – what are some ways you’ve overcome the problems posed by geography using technology or other means?

The remainder of this episode will soon be posted.

We’ve received some search traffic from users searching for the phrase Auction Listing Specialist. As involved as we are with the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) and not ever hearing of such a course or designation, we decided to search it out as any responsible skeptic would.

It seems that Auction Listing Specialist is a course offered by a Delaware company called Auction Work at Home. It looks to be an instructional course for eBay users, not auctioneers. From what we can tell, the concept is that the service farms out to its members the labor for creating eBay listings and processing the sales and rebates on merchandise sold.

Skimming through the extremely long information page that describes the service, you can find an asking price of $197. You’ll also see warnings at the end of the page about how the price will soon go up substantially, how there are very limited time benefits available for those who sign up immediately and how today is probably the final day before they reach their limit. It seems there are only so many people who can take the course, though the material advertises elsewhere how over 1,000 people have already taken the course. Smart money says that the page hasn’t changed in some time and won’t for some time.

You’ll see the claim that “this is the only certified program in the world for auction listing…”. We think that the program isn’t so much for auction listings but rather for eBay listings. While eBay uses competitive bidding for some of the listings there and can technically be described as an auction marketplace, auctions are rapidly becoming a minority of selling methods on eBay, and calling an eBay training service an Auction Listing Specialist course seems like it might open the door for some people to mistakenly assume that the course is for auctioneers instead of eBay users.

We couldn’t find in the offer materials the name of the person or agency who certified the program and didn’t certify any other programs. While it’s the first and only eBay listing program we’ve seen, we haven’t look very hard for any others. We know for a fact that the Auction Technology Specialist (ATS) course offered by the National Auctioneers Association is a course certified by the NAA Educational Institute and that it does a good job instructing auctioneers how to do a good job listing items for real auctions. It is the only technology and auction listing course offered by the National Auctioneers Association.

The business model description includes references to a fixed profit of something like $13 per listing. This information suggests that each listing would have a fixed price or a minimum, which means that the listings wouldn’t really be auctions anyway. If the listings are truly auctions, the business model would have to ensure that at least $13 profit was made on each item, but capping the payments to the person listing the items means that any additional profit, based on the sales price less the cost of goods sold and less eBay’s commissions, wouldn’t go to that person.

The materials also reference processing rebates. We’ve purchased items from eBay that have had the bar codes cut off and now wonder if such products might have originated from services such as this one.

All in all, this program makes many claims and statements that deserve a skeptical investigation. It may be a viable and profitable enterprise, but we’ve studied it enough to know two things. If we wanted to be more educated about listing items on eBay, we’d visit the eBay Learning Center. If we wanted to learn how to be better at listing items for auctions, we’d take the Auction Technology Specialist course offered by the NAA.

UPDATE: After this post was published, I tried to close the tabs. Two JavaScript pop-ups prevented me from doing so. One pop-up offered an additional $50 discount which brought the price down to $147 and the other strongly encouraged me not to leave. I’m still not gong to say this service is a scam, but if it isn’t then why does it employ the same JavaScript pop-ups commonly used by scam sites?

It’s time for a little year-end housekeeping. With all of the top lists being created regarding the previous year, we couldn’t help but join in with a top list and a review of everything we’ve done so far. Here are our top six posts that we like.

1. ATS designation – Auction Technology Specialist for auctioneers
2. Today is a special day, vote for science
3. Example RFP for new or redesigned website
4. Accessible websites, more RFP ideas
5. Purple Wave unveils grouped extension system for equipment auction
6. Never use letters in advertised phone numbers

Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES is the author of AuctioneerTech

Here is our year in review, with a summary for each month. Don’t forget that you can always go straight to the posts for any given month using the links in the side bar on the right.

July
While the site launched in September, we cheated a little bit by scraping from other sources and populating it with a few related posts made previously on the NAA discussion forum as well as aarontraffas.com. We covered the NAA forum, Ubuntu Linux, and PDF tools, as well as mentioned hosted exchange, some other email clients and Google Apps. We touched on how Internet Explorer is a great browser so long as it’s fully patched. We talked about how while Windows Vista is slower than XP in speed, it’s superior to XP in many ways that count such as security, stability and forward compatibility.

August
We  only scraped one post for August, and that was a short post about Flash and website usability. We dove much deeper into the topic with a series of posts in November.

September
The site launched on September 8, but September 2 featured a scraped article from aarontraffas.com about the release of Google Chrome, which held our attention for a few weeks until we went back to Firefox and Opera. We covered OpenOffice 3, noted that eBay is declining and only accepting Paypal, and had the first article about auctioneers. We discussed advertising for Internet only auctions and Apple’s new iPods, as well as evangelized about Secunia, Twitter, and Skyfire. We migrated from one laptop to another and showed how MozBackup and Belarc Advisor help make the process easier. We examined how phpList makes bulk email list management easier for auctioneers and we also had two posts about PDFs showing that you should use them sparingly and never use Adobe products when the alternatives are faster and cheaper.

This author took part in the Kansas Auctioneer Association bid call competition at the Kansas State Fair and has a live blog from the experience as well as a video to prove it. The experience was the catalyst for a position post on why state associations should use computerized tabulation for bid call competitions.

September saw the first five Auction Podcasts as well as the listing of the series within the podcast section of iTunes. The episodes were based generally on content from existing posts on AuctioneerTech. There was the primier on advertising Internet only auctions, a tech roundup covering several shorter posts, and podcasts covering PDF and phpList.

Robert Mayo. CAI, CAGA, AARE was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 7

October
The first post in October was one of celebration after finally figuring out how to prevent the nasty screen flickering found when using an external monitor on some laptops loaded with Vista. While we were talking about multiple monitors, we showed how Synergy can be used to share your mouse between multiple computers, not just multiple screens. We noted and showed examples of how auctioneers are using WordPress for auction sites and described in depth the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA.

A new resource list was created that is an ongoing project listing all companies and providers involved with auction clerking, cashiering and Internet bidding. We showed how OpenDNS makes the web faster and safer, and how Google Adwords allows auctioneers to find a very targeted audience in a very short amount of time. We announced a critical security update for Windows and explained the importance of keeping your data encrypted while showing how Truecrypt makes it crazy-simple to do. For collaboration needs, we talked about how UStream makes it easy for auctioneers to broadcast video of events for free and how ShowMyPC and LogMeIn make Internet meetings free and much more simple than other expensive solutions such as GoToMeeting or WebEx. For those auctioneers who want to be a little geeky, we gave away the secret to a free education at W3 Schools.

Brandon Harker with Auction Flex was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 9

October’s podcasts covered Internet bidding as well as Adwords and OpenDNS. October found the first podcast guests in interviews with Robert Mayo of Mayo Auction and Realty and Brandon Harker of Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex.

November
In November, we caught election fever and wrote about the importance of science in society and of ensuring that our elected officials understand the importance of science and technology. We discussed how hosted Exchange lets companies share Outlook contacts and calendars properly without the headache of managing an Exchange server.

We got geeky with files and talked about how 7-zip is the best compression utility and how a Drobo will let you sleep at night. We broke a story about AVG flagging one of the files in Adobe Flash as a virus, and we’re still getting several visits each day to the website from users searching for information about flashutil10a.exe.
Toward the end of November,we launched a series of discussions on what could go in an RFP for an auctioneer looking to build a new or redesign an existing website. Thanks to our friend Rob Spectre for posting some additional topics. We repeated that it was easy to use Google Docs to build simple web forms and wondered aloud if having auctions on Black Friday was a good idea.

Darron Meares, CAI, MBA, CPPA was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 10

November saw the Auction Podcast shift from being rehashed content on a separate page to new content included on the main page. November’s podcasts included an interview with Darron Meares of Meares Auction Group, a show on how open source software makes life easier and reduces expenses on software, and a controversial episode explaining that in many cases if you’re shipping auction items you’ve failed in marketing.

December
We continued our discussion about RFP ideas with some notes and comments about accessible websites. We looked from a marketing perspective at the importance of never using letters in advertised phone numbers, making sure an auction website had the upcoming auction calendar front and center with thumbnails, and ensuring that video is distributed properly. We also emphasized how important it is to be careful when browsing, and showed that Firefox users can browse freely and safely when running NoScript.

There were some interesting ideas covered such as Mahalo’s introduction of human-powered answers, as well as a New York auctioneer offering to negate the buyer’s premium in exchange for prepaid transactions. The National Auctioneers Association released the NAA Newsroom and Auction Answers and some dude royally ruined an auction by the Bureau of Land Management. Purple Wave released a new twist on the Internet only bidding model, a grouped extension feature that extends the entire group if a bid is received in the last few minutes.

The final Auction Podcast of 2008 covered dual agency with regards to absentee bid implementation. The final posts of the year included articles on letting your computer help science when you’re not using it, using Foxit Reader’s new typewriter tool to write on PDFs for free, and using Mint to automatically track your finances. We thanked you for racking up over 1000 listens to the Auction Podcast and encouraged you to go vote for the coolest tech of the year.

Going forward
It’s been a great four months; thanks to everyone for the kind words. Thanks to all of you who have left comments or feedback in response to articles or other comments, your participation is immensely valuable. Thanks to the guests who have been featured in podcasts and thanks to the guests who have already committed to podcast appearances in 2009. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. We’ll see you next year.

Robert Mayo, CAI, ATS, AARE, CAGA

AuctioneerTech – Joining me today for the first of the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Robert Mayo, CAI, ATS, AARE, CAGA. Robert is an auctioneer and broker with Mayo Auction and Realty in Kansas City, MO. He is also the 2007 and 2008 Kansas State Champion Auctioneer. Good morning, Robert, and thank you for joining me.

Robert Mayo – Good morning Aaron. I appreciate you inviting me for this podcast.

AT – We’re pretty excited about it. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be an auctioneer.

RM – I came from a background of health care and health care information management and kind of stumbled upon the auction industry. I’ve always been an entrepreneur and had been studying different businesses and different industries and discovered the auction industry merely by chance and once I got a taste of the excitement and the very diverse aspect of it – no two days are the same in the auction industry – once I got a taste of that, it really suited me very well, my personality and my make-up, if you will. So I was drawn to it immediately. It’s been eight years now we’ve been in business – about nine years in pursuit of our business and eight years in business. We have an auction business in the Kansas City metropolitan area and serve parts of Kansas and Missouri, primarily in real estate and firearms, coins and collectibles, and we do some estate auctions and business liquidation auctions and also some benefit and fund raising auctions as well.

A couple of years ago, I don’t remember the exact date, but you moved to a new facility there – I think it’s on Wornol there in Kansas City.

Yeah, it’ll be two years this February.

Mayo Auction and Realty

What was your business like before then and how has having that facility changed or altered how you conduct business?

Prior to moving to our new facility – we’ve been there for almost two years – we had a brick and mortar office in a suburb of Kansas City and we focused primarily on real estate. The main focus of our business was real estate, both at auction and traditionally or conventionally. We recognized that we were turning down some opportunities because we did not have, well, basically square footage to operate and conduct auctions off site. All of our business was done on site, whether it be estate, business liquidation and, of course, real estate is mostly always on site, unless we do a multi-property auction. Having the opportunity to open – we have about 7500 square feet at our facility – has given us opportunity to take consignment of items that we focus on, like I said earlier, primarily firearms, coins and collectibles – things of that nature. Before, we didn’t have the ability to take those items on consignment and to conduct consignment auctions where maybe a seller only has five or six pieces. But you put those all together and it’s easier to conduct a four hundred, six hundred lot auction and have the ability to do our inventory management and photography and everything in a secure, safe location without having to move the items too many times.

Now that you’ve expanded into the personal property, and you still do a lot of real estate, I know, how do you keep everybody on the same page? What are some tools you use and your procedures to keep your real estate crew and your auction managers and your sales associates – everybody – talking to one another without just having all day long meetings everyday?

That’s a good question. We’re fortunate that – and it’s a moving target – we’re fortunate that we’re still pretty small so the management oversight of that allows us to communicate effectively using pretty common technology like using Outlook and email and your run-of-the-day technology that we all use, whether it be cell phones and whatnot. It is a challenge to keep everyone on the same page. Probably the biggest thing that we’ve done is to try to give those who are in charge of those projects the ability to make the decisions they need to make to manage their project individually and not have it too much of a micro-managed situation. That probably would create more headache if we had. I can see a need for that if you had more employees and a bigger staff where you had to micro-manage that more because you’re going to break up those tasks into more job-like, more individually-tasked where someone’s just doing one task and this person’s just doing this task. That would require a lot more management oversight and we just don’t have that challenge yet.

What’s the average marketing campaign at Mayo Auction and Realty? What do you do for real estate and personal property for marketing and print and electronic media? What’s your focus?

You mean from a dollars and cents point of view?

What’s the break-up? Do you do mostly print advertising, mostly Internet-based, neither, both?

It’s a combination of print advertising, direct mail and Internet or web-based marketing I would say would be the main focuses of our marketing.

Do you see trends as far as an overall reduction, maybe, in mailers or an increase in certain different…

Well, when we started out…within the first few years of our business, we really cut back on the mailers because we saw the big push for everything to be more Internet or web-based, and what we’ve recognized is that through kind of an experiment a few years ago, what we did was we started to do a small mailer – a postcard mailer – to some of our buyers in our database to see what kind of a response we would get from that. What we’ve seen is, in our opinion kind of a renaissance back to the old school of marketing. People appreciate getting those mailers and we’ve had people that have come to the auction who’ve said that they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t receive that mailer. So we’ve kind of gone back to some old school techniques. There’s no doubt that those mailers – our goal is to push them to our website where we can put more information on and have an extensive catalog with more photographs and more detail of the items – you just can’t put all that in the mailer or on paper without spending a ton of money. So the goal of any marketing is still to get them to take action, whether it be to come back to our website and register for the auction or to come back to the website to get the additional information that they need so they’re compelled to come to the live auction if it’s a live auction or register if it’s an Internet only auction.

Who does your website?

It’s self-maintained. We do it ourselves. We had an individual that helped us develop it in the beginning phases and we’ve taken that over and we manage it ourselves now.

What are the pros and cons of doing that?

Pros less money, cons less time. [laughs]

Sure.

And actually I think you’d probably add a few more to that. Some of the cons might be that we’re obviously not experts in web design. We know enough to be competent, but there are people out there who obviously spend a lot more time staying abreast of the latest not just trends but the latest policies and latest standards, if you will, and it’s good to have professional people involved to make sure you’re not going in a direction that’s going to take you a lot to overcome once you realize you’ve gone down the wrong road.

One of the other big pros, though, is that you have not only total control but immediate ability to update that and you don’t have to rely on a designer or someone to post that information. There’s not that disconnect where you have to call someone and say “would you please update the site to say this now.”

Absolutely. And the other thing about that is that nobody will ever care about what you do as much as you do, so the quality control issue is a big factor as well.

Let’s talk a little about some of the tools that you use. You are using AuctionRPM to clerk your auctions, is that right?

That’s correct.

What factors affected your decision to choose RPM and what do you feel are some of the most important strengths and weaknesses in that platform?

We were an early implementor of RPM. I think we signed on with them in 2002 when there wasn’t a lot to choose from. AuctionFLEX was just – I don’t know if they were on the market, I don’t think they were a player at the time. Really all you had to choose from was RPM or JBS and SOLD II, CUS – there were a few other system. We analyzed it pretty heavily, and at the time RPM was definitely the leader when we made that decision. It’s a pretty strong product. We had some early challenges with them. One of the reasons that we chose them was they were Windows-based when so many others were DOS-based, if you can believe that in 2002.

Oh, I remember it.

Yeah. [laughs] That was one of the reasons we chose RPM. Some of the challenges that we had early on were that, as a software company they were not real thorough in their testing of new testing of new features before they would release those to their clients. As a result, if you were downloading those new releases and using them, you became the test. Sometimes that could be quite frustrating if you downloaded those releases the night before an important auction and you were testing them at that time during your auction. In fact, that caused a few significant problems early on. I will say though that they really tightened up on that. They improved their infrastructure a couple years later and they became less reckless, if that’s a good way of saying it, in their releases. And maybe just because they probably don’t put out as many releases as they used to, things have become tighter and the products become tighter. If I were to start over today, I’d probably look at a couple other products pretty hard, but overall we’re satisfied with RPM for our needs right now. There’s obviously some limitations in regards to database integration that when you get into more enterprise management type implementation there’s not a lot of control over the product if you want to integrate it into other systems that you might have.

And that’s the biggest key is that you pick a product that fits your firm because all auction firms are different, and so you want something that’s a good fit and a good match.

Correct. And at this time we’re still out-of-the-box usage of that product, so it works really well for us. There are things that we wish it would do better, but overall it’s a pretty strong product and I’d recommend it for a lot of auction companies – not for some, but for a lot – they would find it to be a good product.

You are actually one of the few auctioneers, if I remember right, that has experience with both Proxibid and Maxanet as an Internet bidding platform. What are your experiences, why have you elected to use two different platforms, are you still doing it, and what are the pros and cons of each?

We were also an early user of Proxibid as well. Proxibid is a great product, they’re a great service. We did our first Proxibid auction in 2002 – no 2003 we did our first Proxibid auction – and I remember those days. You know, we only had like six bidders online. It was certainly a different time in regards to online auctions. There’s been a lot of development since then. Proxibid has been a really good service. The reason we chose them, of course, is because it’s so easy to implement live-broadcast auctions using their service. Because of that, it’s an out-of-the-box type situation. Now the problem is, or the challenge is, with Proxibid is that it’s branded, which is fine when you’re conducting an auction through their portal they can bring traffic to your auction. But when you’re marketing in other publications and bringing traffic to them you have a chance of losing those clients to competing auctions on the same day. So there are some limitations there that I think are going to limit their usage in the marketplace in the future as more auctioneers develop their own niche markets and decide that they need a non-branded solution. That’s one of the reasons we started to use the Maxanet product. The Maxanet product is a non-branded solution. It allows us to integrate into our website that static – I know you don’t like that word static…

[laughs]

…that timed auction or that online only timed auction that is non-branded and we’re not competing with other auctions on the same day because we’re not going through a portal. We’ve only just started to use Maxanet. We probably conducted, I believe, four timed auctions using Maxanet through our website. Three of the four have been successful, I’d say one of the four has been sort of mediocre. We’ll continue to use it and build and develop that as a solution to our clients to provide them a timed auction solution. I do see the future, though, of non-branding being essential in live auction webcasts.

You haven’t experimented at all with the live bidding module in Maxanet, have you?

Not yet, no, and that’s certainly something we’d look at as we’re building our non-real estate auction business, we’re continuing to build our buyer pool and will be navigating towards that non-branded solution so we’re going to be looking at a lot of different options for that.

What are some other – this will give you a chance to talk about anything you think is cool right now – what are some other ways that you’re using technology to attract more bidders and buyers and sellers and help your business?

Boy, you know some of the grassroots guerrilla marketing techniques have been what’s been exciting recently, and it’s not anything new, but Craigslist is a good example. I was looking at my Google Analytics account the other day, and I don’t know if I want to – well, I’ll share this it’s not that big of a deal.

[laughs]

I was looking at my Analytics account the other day and looking at my traffic sources, and still direct traffic to our website is the largest percentage, people who type in our domain name directly. Until a week and a half ago, believe it or not, Google was the largest referrer of traffic to our website, so we feel pretty good about that. But until a week and a half ago, Craigslist was number three and now it became number two behind direct traffic.

Really?

Yeah, and it made us wonder if we’re not getting enough Google traffic [laughs] or are we just getting that much Craigslist traffic. It’s probably a combination of both. It’s a constant battle, search engine optimization, to basically keep your pages optimized for those search engines and make sure that you’re constantly staying in touch with the standards that the search engine algorithms are making sure that your pages get ranked. So we were surprised to see that Craigslist is driving so much traffic to our website. That’s just a grassroots guerrilla marketing technique, and we do it on an item level and sometimes we do it on an event level. The key is not to over-spam or to put too much on there where people get frustrated and start blacklisting, or flagging, your listings, but certainly it can drive traffic to your website. Now, the next question is is it quality traffic. That’s debatable.

I didn’t think about it, but something that may have had an impact on that isI know that in the last month or so there has been some chatter in the tech industry about some Craigslist search products – websites that people have developed that will allow you to search Craigslist with some more advanced filtering that isn’t necessarily locked down by location. And so I wonder if maybe an increase in the use of those newer services might have contributed a little bit to that. I hadn’t thought about that.

That is a good point. The limitation of Craigslist is that its by location, and in a world of buyers that are bidding online and it doesn’t matter where the product is, that is a limitation of Craigslist. I’ll tell you though, we did have a buyer who came to the auction we had two Saturdays ago at our facility, who came to us and said that they found us on Craigslist when they came to pick up their items they founds us on Craigslist and they made purchases, so we know it’s bringing actually buyers to the auction. And that’s just time, it’s not money to do that, it’s just time. Well, time is money but it’s not a hard expense in that regard.

Do you have someone set up on a regular basis to put listings on Craigslist? Is that something that you do on an as-needed basis?

I do it on an as-needed basis and my auction center coordinator Chris does some on an item level as we’re getting closer to the auction. We’ve been playing around with what’s the effective time, you know, how many days before the auction. I don’t think we’ve really figured out that forumula, but that’s certainly a consideration. Too soon you loose the impact and too late you don’t get them. I don’t know that we have an answer on that, but we certainly play around with it to see where we might get some activity. There are some other things that we’ve done. Other discussion groups, discussion boards on specific types of – we had some really nice Lalique  glass in an auction two Saturdays ago and we posted on a Lilique discussion group, a Yahoo group, that these items were in the auction. Sometimes it’s hard to track where the bidders come from, but with that auction we did have a bidder from Israel, which we thought was pretty unique to have that bidder from all the way across the world to participate in that. So there’s no doubt that our markets are not – we’re right here in the heart of Kansas City, 82nd and Wornol, but so much of our buyer participation comes from so far from here. That’s the future of our industry, and the more we can make that easy for people to participate and the more that we can build our reputation as being someone that you can trust when you look at the picture and know that the item is described properly and that any flaws are disclosed. Those kind of things are important to making sure that we’re building buyer confidence and building our buyer pool and making it a good transaction for everybody – the buyer, the seller and us as the auction company.

I think you’re so right that that is the future of our industry and it’s so important that auctioneers who offer Internet bidding and who use technology do get it right, because one bad experience with a competitor may dissuade someone from participating in one of your auctions. I know that you are quite an active member in the National Auctioneers Association and you’ve been involved with the creation of the course material and the instructional level with the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA. What are your thoughts on the designation? Who would you recommend it to? Talk a little bit about that if you would.

Sure. I’m very excited to have been a part of that. It’s, I think, a program that should have been done three or four years ago or maybe even longer. I think it’s far past the time. We really need it. There are a lot of people in our industry that need to catch up, for lack of a better term. The program is hard to kind of describe. There’s so much we go over in the four day period it’s hard for me to describe it completely. The program is, in my opinion, designed for auctioneers who maybe have a basic understanding of technology and are using some technology in their business but really haven’t figured out how to have a strategy that is comprehensive. So by going through this course, you may go through things you already know, but it’s going to be all tied together and give you an opportunity to be able to take what you learn and maybe improve on some of those things that you already knew about and create a strategy that will get you making money using technology. Not just having a website, or not just understanding what a blog is, or not just understanding those items individually, but how can you tie that all together to have a use of technology that will allow you to offer your items to the world and for the world to be able to purchase your items and for your seller to be able to make money and for you to be profitable. I think that’s proably in a nutshell – I think the people that should be taking that course are anybody that doesn’t have it all figured out. And that’s going to be a lot of us.

Probably pretty much everybody.

And there’s no doubt that there are some people that are pretty tech-savvy, and they’re doing online bidding and they’re conducting online auctions and they’re doing those things, and for some of those individuals this course might have a fair amount of information that they already know, but I can say with a certainty that there is a lot of information that can help them be more efficient, more effective and in the end probably get them to look at some things they weren’t thinking about that might improve their bottom line.

Absolutely. Even those people who are using that, like you say – you and I co-taught that course in April and I know that I learned a wealth of information both from you and from even the attendees in the class who ranged from a very low level of technology to a very high level of technology and experience in using technology for auctions, so I would echo that it’s good for anybody who, like you say, doesn’t have it figured out.

And the great thing about that is that, like so many courses that the NAA offers, a lot of education is not just in the classroom, although I would say this course is probably as comprehensive or more than most in regards to actual content. A lot of it is learned from those who are in attendance and just through that sharing of information. And because technology is the fastest changing element in society today, it requires the content to be updated constantly. I remember when I attended my first COMDEX – I don’t know if it’s called the same thing, but it was the big computer convention in Vegas in the early ’90s. I remember the standard then was that whatever is happening right now will be different in three months. It almost seems like whatever is happening right now will be different in a week. That change is just so fast that it requires us to really be on our toes and to really keep abreast of what’s going on and that constant evolution will create so much opportunity for increased knowledge and ability to continue to improve what we’re doing.

Well that’s it for episode seven. Thank you very much, Robert, for joining me.

Thank you.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

The latest designation from the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) is Auction Technology Specialist (ATS). A course written by auctioneers for auctioneers, it offers a comprehensive education for all auctioneers, including those who are self-described as technology-challenged.

Students in the ATS course in Overland Park, April 2008

The biggest misconception about ATS is that it’s designed for operational staff instead of auctioneers. Unlike the Auction Administrator Certification Program, which is indeed targeted at support staff, the ATS course is intended to teach auctioneers to be competent using modern techniques to build their businesses, tap more potential sellers, gain exposure to more buyers and dissect the jargon used by technology vendors to find out what services they really provide and what those services will really cost.

Packing the wallop of 28 credit hours, the focus is not to teach auctioneers to become geeks. It’s clear that the best use of auctioneers’ time is marketing items and services, not writing lines of code. The focus instead is to help the auctioneers understand the purpose, not necessarily the mechanics, of modern gadgets, marketing avenues and website design theory and techniques.

Like most of the courses offered by the NAA, you must have your associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree or approved life equivalency and be 21 years of age or older. In addition to these common requirements, you must also complete two simple, straightforward and free courses offered by Microsoft.

• The Internet and the World Wide Web
• Digital Lifestyles

For an auctioneer with basic Internet knowledge, these courses take minutes to complete. If you’re an auctioneer who is new to technology, computers, Internet or email, these courses provide a great way to become familiar with the basics on your own time. These courses also give you an idea of the assumptions made by the course of the minimum level of understanding possessed by the students of the class. The live course builds on the materials covered in the two Internet courses.

As for the live class, the chapter list on the NAA ATS page is a little out of date. Here’s the list of the current course chapters in order.

Auction Technology Specialist

• Types of Auctions and Their Technology Needs
• Digital Photography and Video
• Image Hosting
• Inventory Management
• Lead Generation and Prospecting
• Marketing Your Auctions
• Payment Processing
• Enterprise Integration
• Websites
• Company Marketing Strategy
• Building an Online Community

The last day of the course is a hands-on exercise that builds on the skills learned during the first three days and demonstrates the listing of items for Internet bidding using multiple platforms as well as posting an item-level listing to the NAA’s state-of-the-art auction calendar.

Finally, after having taken the class, students must conduct an Internet only auction as well as a live auction with Internet bidding available before officially passing the course and gaining the ATS designation.

Here’s the class summary from the NAA website.

The Auction Technology Specialist ( ATS) program will help you understand today’s technology and how to use it to improve your business. ATS consists of two sections. The first section takes place online using the Microsoft eLearning Center. The second section is a live, four-day, classroom experience. To complete the designation, you must complete the four day class, pass the class exam, conduct a live and static auction, and submit the appropriate documentation.

In these scary economic times, many of us will find our businesses evolve. The one thing we cannot afford in this economic downturn is to become lax in our education. Maintaining a pulse on the industry and on technology will let us adjust quickly to these fast-changing times.

If you’re an auctioneer who hasn’t yet done many auctions while providing Internet bidding, you should take ATS. If you’re an auctioneer who doesn’t have a website or who wants to make your website better, you should take ATS. If you’re an auctioneer who is obsessed with auction tech and can’t wait to find out the latest and greatest techniques for improving your auctions, you should take ATS. If you’re an auctioneer looking to build your business using some of the newest social media and guerrilla Internet marketing, you should take ATS. If you’re an auctioneer who is looking to gain a competitive edge on your competition, you should take ATS. If you’re a programmer or the head of technology at your auction firm and are interested in technology and not so much interested in auctions or the auction method, ATS may not be right for you. ATS is for auctioneers.

In the interests of disclosure, I’ve personally been involved with the course for some time, along with several industry leaders in the field of auction tech. I’m quite happy with the way it was developed, the variety of views and materials presented in the coursework and the reception it has received so far from those auctioneers who have taken the course.

The ATS designation, like all the designations from the NAA, tells customers – bidders, buyers and sellers – that you are recognized in the industry for having mastered a skill set. I’m not going to argue the merits of ATS against the other designations offered by the NAA as they’re all valuable. But no matter if you do estate auctions (CES), real estate auctions (AARE), benefit auctions (BAS) or all kinds of auctions, the beauty of ATS is that, regardless of your specialty, it will help you conduct better auctions and be a better auctioneer.

View more information about ATS in Baltimore on November 17 and submit your registration today.