The Art of Business>Business Profile

High Bidders: Local Auction Houses Fill the Room
By Mala Hoffman . Photos by Megan McQuade

The saying might be, As goes real estate, so go the auction houses. So with the booming housing market of the Hudson Valley, local auctioneers are busy, busy, busy all of the time. “The stuff market is still peaking,” notes George Cole, who has been in the business since 1976. “We just can’t get caught up. We’re averaging four to five houses a week. We’re trying to get rid of it all.”

Cole has had an auction house in Red Hook for 12 years, and was in Rhinebeck and Kingston before that. The audience tends to be a “strong city weekend crowd” with day travelers from Albany to Connecticut and Massachusetts. “We’re running every other week until the end of the year,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent are consigned items. We will pick up from [houses in] New Jersey, Connecticut, New York City, and locally.”

Part of his auction’s ongoing popularity is the quality of the items he sells, Cole points out. “We were voted best in the Hudson Valley for the fifth year running,” he adds. “Word of mouth is our best advertising.” In addition to “personable service,” Cole says his auction house offers payment within three weeks, as opposed to other companies that pay in 60 to 90 days.

Cole, who grew up in Kingston, became an auctioneer after answering an ad in the paper. “I took a two-week course that met seven days a week,” he recalls. “The evaluation at the end was to do three live auctions.” But what first got him in the business was an experience he had as a child. “I went to an auction when I was eight years old with $5 in my pocket,” Cole says. “My mother had to come find me at 8 o’clock at night. We filled her car three times, and I still had change in my pocket.”

According to Cole, the company offers a variety of high-end furniture items. “We have sold 20th-century moderne, from the ’50s, to 17th-century primitives,” he points out, as well as cars, real estate, and boats. While Cole runs the auctions, he credits his partner, Robin Mizerak, for keeping track of the numbers. “I’m the mouth,” he laughs. “My partner’s basically the brains.”

For Robert Doyle, who runs Absolute Auction and Realty Company in Beacon and Pleasant Valley with his wife, Susan, says, “It seems like we’re busier than ever.” The company is comprehensive in that it offers home appraisals, auctions, and real estate sales. “It would be nice for us to cherry-pick and get 10 to 12 nice items, but that wouldn’t be serving the community,” Doyle explains.

The couple started a mail-auction company in 1972, through which subscribers had access to a catalogue of items they could bid on by mail or by phone. They brought the live auction format into the business in the mid-80s, and then both became realtors after that. Their first auction gallery was opened in Beacon in 1994, and two years later they purchased the Pleasant Valley Auction Hall, which had been operating since 1946.

According to Doyle, one of the biggest changes in the auction business has been the advent of technology. “We have Internet bidders from all over the country,” he says. “While people will travel to our auctions from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, 30 percent of the items we sell end up selling to people not here at the time of the auction.” Doyle plans to expand on that concept during the auction house’s December show, which will include live “real time” Internet bidding.

Doyle says technology has also improved the auctions themselves. They now employ video screens and Powerpoint presentations as well as digital photography so that the smallest items can be seen clearly throughout the house. “It used to be that for a good painting, I would have ten photos and when they were gone, they were gone,” he notes. “Now someone can see the item at any angle. They can ask to see the mark on the bottom of a platter and we can show it to them.”

Both Doyle and Cole agree that the auction market is also successful because of a knowledgeable client base. “There are a lot of resources now that pretty much help the playing field,” Doyle adds. “It’s good for them and it’s good for us.” And the client base continues to provide demand, which drives the establishment of more and more auction houses, including the recent opening of Hudson Auction Galleries in the renovated former Terry/Gillette mansion on Union Street in Hudson.

What keeps auctioneers in it is the challenge of finding new things, and seeing what they can be sold for. “Part of the beauty of auctioning is that there’s no top price involved,” says Doyle. “There’s always something interesting in every house,” Cole adds.

George Cole Auctions can be reached at (845) 758-9114 or at www.georgecoleauctions.com. To reach Absolute Auction and Realty Co., call (845) 635-3169 or go to www.absoluteauctionrealty.com. Hudson Auction Galleries, 601 Union Street in Hudson, will be holding an auction on Saturday, December 13 at noon. For more information, call (518) 822-9995.

On the Block

“An item’s only worth as much as the next person’s going to spend on it,” says George Cole. So there are times when an auctioneer can be surprised. For Cole, one of those moments involved a primitive pie safe, a cabinet in which pies were placed to cool “so animals wouldn’t get to them.” Cole thought the piece would go for $10,000. The selling price? “It went for $25,000,” he says.

Cole adds that although there are resources available for auctioneers, the best teacher in terms of pricing items is experience. “24 hours a day,” he says.

Robert Doyle points out that while there can be positive surprises, there can also be disappointments. Still, he has found that if he does strong marketing both on the Internet and to his target markets, “the collective thinking on the buying side meets the market price.”

One of his pleasant surprises occurred during his last auction. “We had an upholstered chair. It had no cushions and several tears in the fabric. It was basically just the frame and out of the landfill,” Doyle recalls. “But we recognized it as an 18th-century wingback. We thought it would go for $1,000 and it ended up selling for just over $3,000.”

Those positive experiences are not necessarily limited to furniture, Doyle adds. One high-rise building he was auctioning off in Queens in anticipation of a $32 million selling price went for $55.2 million. “There’s always that opportunity and chance that you can bring in a higher price, no matter what the category,” he says.