[meteorite-list] Heritage auction

From: Yinan Wang <veomega_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:21:20 -0400
Message-ID: <CALpO9HeZn0=eNuCxZahfx13waMojge41w+hgEPpn4ZvA=bSK0Q_at_mail.gmail.com>

No offense intended, but how do you interpret this auction as a train wreck?

Having worked in the natural history auction industry, this was a very
good auction for everything except the high priced pieces. From what I
observed, the sell-through rate was probably over 80%, which is great
for a natural history auction. Many of the lower and middle ranged
items went for 3-10 times the market price.

High priced meteorites in general don't seem to sell often at auction.
For example, the Willamette was very well marketed last year but did
not sell at $650,000. Looking at past auctions, it seems $90,000 to be
the top price for a meteorite sold at auction in the past few years,
at least with this auction house.

Personally I think the market for extreme high end meteorites may not
be well established in auction houses yet. Yes, someone will (and has)
shell out up to 2 million for a dinosaur at auction but won't do the
same for a meteorite.

-Yinan



On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Adam Hupe <raremeteorites at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think the timing of this auction during the middle of a political campaign might account for the train wreck witnessed today or the economy is worse off then anybody could imagine. Prices were all over the place, some excellent, some poor but not a single item exceeded $50,000.00 even with the huge buyer's premium in place. A few of my friends watched parts of this auction on CNN and thought many of the descriptions should have been based on the importance of the items instead of comparing them to famous artwork.
>
> All of the big auction houses are struggling right now from what I have read. Hopefully things will settle back down after the election.
>
> Best Regards,
>
>
> Adam
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Received on Sun 14 Oct 2012 09:21:20 PM PDT