One Spring Day many years back, I was referred to a Main Line Suburban Philadelphia client. She was selling her 1950’s home and down-sizing. Her home was filled with many very nice period Mid Century Modern Furniture and Furnishings. She knew precisely which items she would be taking to her new smaller living space. She also knew which items she was giving to family members. She had rugs, lighting, and decorative pieces to fit her MCM feel. She was friendly and helpful, providing background information on her items and knew where and about when she acquired them and sometimes how much she paid for them. She had many of the original invoices. Having good information is very helpful to an auction house. It makes presenting, offering, and promoting valuable items more efficient and makes auction bidders more comfortable. These components lead to more bidders and higher winning bids.
As with most selling clients, not everything she was looking to sell had enough auction value for us to offer at our upscale auctions. During the time we were helping her, she agreed on an offer to buy her home. Some of her items we were not offering at our auctions and the home buyer was interested in purchasing several of them. Our auction client did some research and assigned values to each of the items including a very nice piano. When the home buyer came back with counter offers on her items, she planned to accept them all except for the offer on the piano. She thought the $800 she offered was a fair deal and their $400 counteroffer was much too low, so she asked for my opinion.
My answer was quite different than she expected. I recommended she absolutely accept the offer on the piano. If she wanted to negotiate, do it on any of the other items. I explained that if the buyer decided not to buy the piano and she did not sell it in another way, she would have the expense of moving it. Additionally, she may need to store it until she found a buyer for the piano which may be an additional cost. After thinking about it and some encouragement from me in our conversations, she agreed to accept their offer. Her items sold at our auctions in the coming months and she watched each item with anticipation. After settling into her new living space for a short time, she called me and thanked me and Kamelot for helping her.
To my surprise, she called me again several years later and thanked me again. It is not unusual for clients to reach out and thank me once but not again years later. It turns out, her sister lived across the country had recently down-sized and had a piano to sell with interest from her home buyers. Her sister did not accept their piano offer. She ended up moving and storing the piano and it was costing her money every month. Her second thank you sounded even more grateful (and relieved) than her initial thank you.