Market Intelligence
Bonhams online: when marketing works
Bonhams, one of the major auction houses, has reported a highly successful online auction in conjunction with the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance. Despite recent trends of other auction houses abandoning online auctions, 95.35% of the lots at the Bonhams auction were sold, with 19 lots – over 40% – exceeding their maximum estimate. The success has been attributed to the high number of cars entered without reserve and conservative estimates, as well as a range of accessible, high-quality cars including 15 Rolls Royces from the 1930s and 1950s, a range of Aston Martins and a mix of other cars, all offered at prices too expensive for normal online auctions but too cheap for face-to-face auctions. The top lot of the auction was a 1966 Aston Martin DB6 Vantage, which sold for $500,000, almost double its estimated value.
The season of online auctions for the larger auction houses seemed to have passed. Gooding abandoned this method in June, now using it only for automobilia. RM not only decided to make these sales increasingly rare (in the first half of the year it had 6, in the second just 3), but it’s also placing fewer and fewer important cars there – at their last sale they took home less than $1.4 million in total sales, the equivalent of a single lot in Monterey.
It seemed almost obvious that Bonhams had also decided to invest fewer resources in this sector, especially in light of the recent purchase of The Market and its interest in expanding it in the USA. And instead, the recent online auction that took place “in conjunction” with the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance was more than a success.
