Two of the most prestigious honors given during the annual CAI designation classes are the Rose Award and Pat Massart Award.

The NAA presented the awards to Auctioneers Buddy Lee and Ruthie Taylor, respectively, during the opening session of CAI 2010 on March 21. CAI classes kicked off this week on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.

The Rose Award honors the contestant with the best auction summary, which participants in CAI III are required to complete in order to earn their CAI designations. Lee was joined in the finals by these NAA Auctioneers:

• Tirhani Mabunda, AARE, Tirhani Auctioneers, South Africa
• Megan McCurdy, BAS, McCurdy Auction LLC, Wichita, Kan.
• Braden McCurdy, McCurdy Auction LLC, Wichita, Kan.
• Bobby Ewald, AARE, CES, Ewald Enterprises Inc. Dba Ewald Auction & Realty, Orlando, Fla.
• Bill Dollinger, AARE, RE/MAX 100 Inc, Louisville, Ky.

The Pat Massart Award honors the CAI II contestant with the best auction proposal, which is required of CAI II students. Taylor of Taylor Auction & Realty Inc., Grenada, Miss., was joined in the finals by these NAA Auctioneers:

• Warren Ward, AARE, Albert Burney Inc., Gadsden, Ala.
• Jodi Reynolds, Aumann Auctions Inc., Nokomis, Ill.

This article was sourced from NAA on Facebook.

Finishing our series on auctioneer education and designations offered by the National Auctioneers Association, the Certified Auctioneers Institute weighs in as the most prestigious and honored course available to auctioneers.

Held in Bloomington, Indiana, each year for a week in March, CAI is a three-year certification program that graduates the most professional and well-educated auctioneers in the industry. Attendees are housed in the hotel attached to the world’s largest campus union building at Indiana University.

CAI kicks off on Sunday with an opening brunch where class I is welcomed and awards are given to project winners from classes II and III. After a brief orientation, the course wastes no time getting auctioneers to class. The bulk of CAI is made of nine class sessions, 3.5 hours each, with activities most evenings. Wednesday night holds a benefit auction and Friday morning holds the final exam, followed by a final general session.

The course materials covered at CAI include a mix of instructors from both within and without the auction industry. Experts on a wide range of topics ranging from finance to marketing and from technology to real estate provide insight, examples and materials to help auctioneers learn to be more professional, proficient and powerful in their businesses.

Here’s the description from the NAA website.

Designed for leaders in the industry and auction firm decision-makers, the CAI is an executive development program focused on developing the skills and providing the tools necessary to run a top-notch auction firm.

Designation holders have the knowledge and skill necessary to provide high-quality services to all types of clients.

In addition, their designation indicates to attorneys, trust officers, government officials, financial planners, accountants and others who seek the services of well-qualified auctioneers that the CAI designation holder is an astute business person whose conduct will follow the highest professional standards.

With all NAA educational offerings, the true value of the materials is exacerbated by the networking inherent in the aggregation of over a hundred auctioneers from various sectors and experiences. No article about CAI would be complete without a mention of Nick’s English Hut, the traditional after-class destination of CAI candidates and instructors alike. There, the information presented during the course is casually discussed, disected and absorbed.

There are many CAI auctioneers who claim that this networking of auctioneers with different ideas and experiences is as valuable as the course materials presented, though we’re pretty confident that the networking wouldn’t be as valuable without the course materials. There’s no question that the networking from CAI results in life-long friendships and business relationships.

If you’d like to learn more about CAI, or find out about the application process, visit the course webpage.

NAA CEO Hannes Combest, CAE - image via GCM Blog

Hannes Combest, CAE, is the Chief Executive officer of the National Auctioneers Association. Yesterday, she launched a blog over at Blogspot with a series of articles about the Certified Auctioneers Institute, currently underway in Bloomington, Indiana. We’ll be covering CAI next week as the conclusion of our series on NAA designations, but head over to Hannes’s blog now for some great play-by-play accountings of the most educational and exciting offering from the NAA Education Institute.

To our knowledge, Hannes’s blog is the first and only blog from a member of NAA staff. We hope Hannes continues to post and that blogging might become part of the official duties of several members of NAA staff, perhaps officially making it into the new NAA website which is currently in the works.

You’ll find a permanent link to her blog in the blogroll of auction support sites in the lower right column of this website. If you know of any other non-vendor, non-auctioneer weblogs or websites, please let us know in the comments.

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.

Benton County Auto Auction website screenshot

I theorized back at CAI in Bloomington, Indiana, last March that it would be possible to use WordPress to power a website for an auction company. WordPress is a remarkable, extensible and mostly standards-compliant website scripting engine that allows for very easy content generation without website coding experience. AuctioneerTech proudly uses WordPress, and I also use it for the Aaron Traffas Band website, as well as a more private website that I run for my family. I love its simplicity, customizability and expandability.

Today I came across a search engine for WordPress-powered websites. I punched up auction and found several websites for auction companies that were indeed using WordPress.

Here they are in the order I found them.

http://www.bentoncountyautoauction.com/
http://chevroletcarauctions.com/
http://laymanauction.com/
http://schultzauctioneerslandmarkrealty.com/
http://www.cloudsauctions.com/
http://www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/

Some of the sites listed above were customised to such an extent that there must be some developer actively involved in that customization. Some were not. Which are your favorites and why?

These auctioneers recognized the power and freedom of the WordPress system and have, to varying degrees, customized their sites to overcome some of the standard blog-with-menu-on-the-right-or-left design elements that come standard with most WordPress installations. Many website hosts such as LunarPages and GoDaddy offer the ability to install the basic WordPress system with a menu-driven control panel so that from the time you register and provide payment to the time you’re beginning to customise your installation, you’ve spent 5 minutes using your computer to register and install WordPress and a few hours waiting for the domain name to become active and never once touched an FTP client.

I’m not advocating the use of WordPress instead of a professionally-designed website. As an auctioneer, I’d rather have a great website than a working phone number. I’m merely pointing out that it’s an option for some auctioneers who can’t afford the hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of dollars that a real website costs.