What to look for in an online auction provider
Of course every online auctioneer notifies you when you’ve placed a bid, been outbid by another buyer, or won an auction. It should also notify you if you didn’t win an auction, and provide the complete bidding history for review. But Oresy.com believes real estate auctions online have several special requirements:
● The extension of the auction by a few minutes if a bidder drops a last-second high bid so that all bidders can place their final bids. In other words, nobody can “steal” a house by topping the current bid by a dollar. For the seller, this means you will realize a higher price; for buyers, this discourages “gaming the system”.
● Once a bidder has placed a bid in an auction, the system must notify them as higher bids are placed and provide an opportunity to outbid the current highest bid. Since most buyers are away from their browser for much of the auction, this helps keep bids flowing so that the maximal value of the property can be reached by the bidders.
● Automated bidding. In other words, you can bid $200,000 to place the highest bid, but you can also specify a maximum bid that’s even higher. If you enter $250,000 as your maximum and nobody outbids your offer of $200,000, you win at that amount. If another bidder offers $210,000, a slightly higher bid will be placed on your behalf. This continues until another bidder offers more than your maximum or you have won the auction.
● The process of creating a property listing must be self-explanatory, including the posting of an unlimited number documents and multimedia files, such as photographs, reports, and disclosures. The multimedia is crucial marketing: it’s based on these that prospective buyers will decide to visit the property in person before the auction.
