Never Do This At An Auction – Confessions Of An Auctioneer

An auction is the only way to buy a house where you sign an unconditional contract, in public, in about four minutes. So, what's really going on in the room... and how do you avoid getting played? In this episode, Ed and Andrew sit down with Daniel Coulson https://www.raywhite.co.nz/people/daniel-coulson – the CEO of Ray White NZ – who's called around 8,000 auctions. You'll learn: The mistakes bidders make at auctionWhat auctioneers can and can't legally doWhether the usual auction tricks and tips still workThe lesson? Most people walk into an auction not knowing the rules of the game. Learn them, and you walk in with the upper hand. Let us know your thoughts by leaving us a voice message on the Property Academy Hotline⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.speakpipe.com/PropertyAcademy For more from Opes Partners: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sign up for the weekly Private Property newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.opespartners.co.nz/newsletter-sign-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/opes_partners/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@opespartners

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome along to the Property Academy Podcast by Opes Partners. I'm your host, Steve McKnight. And I'm Andrew Nichol. And this is the show that helps Kiwis go from zero to five investment properties. So you could be financially free and stick around for the next 15 minutes because you're going to learn about the mistakes bidders make at auction from the man who's run 8,000 of them. What an auctioneer is actually allowed to do and what they're not. And do the usual auction tricks and tips still work? And I think this really matters because most people walk into an auction room without really knowing the rules of the game. But remember, an auction is basically the only way of buying a house. Where you sign a contract to buy it with no conditions in public, four minutes after

• 0:52Speaker 00

  putting up your hand and the hammer coming down. So today we have caught someone who's called 8,000 auctions and is now the CEO of Ray White. Welcome to the show, Daniel Coulson.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much for having me, gents and avid listener of the show. So I appreciate the opportunity to be on.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Are you really?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I am indeed.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Now, Daniel, I just, I have to say, Ed's just made that sound like quite a simple job. Just, you know, four minutes later, someone buys a property, no conditions, job done. Give me your $30,000 cheque. Is it that simple?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I wish it was that simple. It'd be great if it was that simple. And I certainly think the buyers and the sellers would be pretty delighted if it was that simple, but there is a bit more to the process than than just the four minutes of the auction itself.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Can you just walk me through that, just out of curiosity? Because I mean, I've been to a few auctions, obviously. I remember Ed buying his house at auction. I think I was more nervous about that one than than any other one that I'd been to. What is the normal process?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, the auction itself is the culmination of three to four weeks normally of a marketing campaign of establishing the property's position in the market, understanding who the buyers are, the owner making a series of decisions along the way to, you know, to get to the day itself. The auction is like the tip of the iceberg, if you like, for all the work that's gone on beforehand.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Now, if we think about those 8,000 auctions, you must get very good at reading people, trying to figure out if there's a little bit more juice you can squeeze out of that orange. What do you know about people now that you didn't know when you started at your first auction?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's an amazing display, an auction, either an auction room or an auction at a home. It's an amazing display of of human psychology sort of playing out in real time across all elements of sort of people's reaction and and response to various things. You've got, you know, the competitive validation. So how much confidence people take from seeing somebody else do something. But equally on the other side, how much hesitation there can be when somebody else doesn't do what you thought they were going to do. One of the things that you do notice, and I'm sure you, you two will have seen this having been in auction rooms as well, is that people respond to unfamiliar, or let's face it, for many people, particularly who are buying their own home, when they're emotionally

• 3:06Speaker 01

  invested, they can be in somewhat of an uncomfortable environment. And seeing the way that people respond to that is quite fascinating from the, you know, the fight, the flight or the freeze sort of response that people have. And you see that play out in real time in an auction. So having that ability to to sort of see how people are displaying that human behaviour, how we respond to it as an auctioneer and how we can help sort of give people a degree of comfort to really guide them to what they're ultimately looking to achieve, which which is to buy a house.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Daniel, you're based in Auckland, right?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yes, I am now.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  If you, if you were buying a house right now and or if you were selling your house right now, would it be auctioned by default for both of those auctions?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  For me, it would be. I would auction my own home in Auckland today. You know, obviously, there's different market conditions in which auction has a different outcome. You make the point earlier about the fact that it's a four minute process and that the deal's done, the property's sold, it's unconditional. In a really buoyant market, auction is normally used to obviously find the premium price. How do we, how do we find the very best money from the best buyer in the market at the pointy end of the market when conditions are strong? In a market that's more subdued, which we've seen in Auckland particularly more recently, we look at the auction as a way to provide a different premium. And that premium is the certainty of a result. It's an unconditional sale.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And bringing a deadline to a process which, to be fair, in Auckland days on market have continued to sort of lengthen out, auction is a way to keep control on those days on market for a seller that's probably not wanting to do open homes week after week after week. So it's about concentrating the activity that's in any given market at any given time.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  If you were to go in and bid on a house to buy yourself, there are different strategies that people like to employ. Some people like to be really aggressive and and bid quickly and bid strong in order to try and scare off the competition. Other people like to slow it down, take their time, bid in little itty bitty increments. What would your strategy be if you were buying yourself?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Well, I can probably speak from experience a little bit, having bought a few of my own homes at auction over the years, you know, sitting on the other side of the fence, I've always opened the bidding.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  In each occasion, I've always opened the bidding. That's because I've seen it work in the past to establish somebody's position as a credible competitor in an auction. I've also been quite strategic about the way that I bid in the auction. And by that, I mean the increments by which the bidding moves forward. If the competitor that I'm bidding against reduces the increment, I might not necessarily just follow the normal pattern of the auction. I, if we're going in $25,000 bids and it drops to 10s, I might stay in the 25s because what does that say to the competitor that I'm bidding against? It says, I'm pretty comfortable with the 25s and I'll keep going.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. How much of that success for you is because you're probably quite recognised in the circles of real estate? So you turn up and someone thinks, oh, God, here's the CEO of Ray White. I might just have to peg this one down a bit and actually let him win.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Well, as complimentary as that statement may be, I don't think that's got anything to do with it, to be quite frank. Probably not as recognised as you might believe. But equally, I think, you know, when you walk into an auction room, that's possibly the statement that is important to consider is it's not, it's not the buyer versus the auctioneer, it's actually the buyer versus the other buyers. So the people that I'm competing against when I'm a bidder at an auction or when anyone's a bidder in an auction, the competition's the other buyers, it's not the auctioneer.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yes. How much of that idea of I'm going to, I'm going to bid strong, I'm going to get it, I'm going to try and show them that I'm serious? How much of that actually works in terms of scaring the other person of making them feel a bit despondent, making them feel like, oh, actually, I'm not going to win this one. So it's not worth putting the hand up one more time? Or is it that they just keep on bidding in those smaller increments in order to, you know, get the lowest price that they possibly want? Like, how much of all of this works?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. And having seen it sort of play out so many times over the years, we often, my, my response has often been in an auction, when somebody does ask to reduce the increment, has been, you really make it harder for your competition by reducing the increment by which they have to bid. So if you can remain at a higher increment, you're probably going to be making it more challenging for for the buyer that you're bidding against. Equally, if you're in a position and you are running out of money or you are getting close to the pointy end of what you might be able to pay for a property, best thing is to not indicate that that's the case by reducing the increment because it's a pretty clear signal then to your competitor that you might be running out of dough.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Now, obviously, if you go up by 25K increments and the other side, they were going up by 10K increments, you're starting to think, I'm wearing them thin. That doesn't necessarily mean that they still have to go back to 25K increments. Like, they could go up by 10,000 if they wanted to, right?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You could have one buyer going up in 10s and one buyer going up in 25s and another buyer going up in another number. It's actually the auctioneer that can determine the amount by which people are bidding. But there's no requirement for everyone to be bidding the same amount the whole way through the auction.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Now, one story that I know Ed and I have spoken about on the podcast before, but it was just, it just, it was one of the most exciting moments of my life when it came to negotiation was over in Australia, there was a buyer's advocacy service that was run by a couple of friends of friends. And I went across to see them and they were talking about, you know, the really buoyant market, it was like 15 years ago. And they had some tactics that I just thoroughly enjoyed, just because I love a deal. And what they'd do is the two of them, the husband and wife duo, they'd both go along to an auction to try and represent a buyer. And then what they would do is he would intentionally slow the bidding down, she would try and speed it up.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  And then he would get to a point where he'd make this big song and dance and scream, oh, this is ridiculous, way too expensive and storm off to try and put other buyers off. Have you ever seen anything like that and does it actually work?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Or not, not quite that convoluted or complicated, I must admit, or certainly not that I'm aware of anyway. I mean, obviously, you get emotion in an auction room, you get people that that might storm out from time to time. But normally what you'll find is that if a buyer is there to purchase, they will, in most cases, be there with a genuine, you know, here I am, I'm going to try and buy. There is a degree of risk, obviously, when you start. I'm assuming what you were explaining in that situation was basically two people representing the same party bidding against each other.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And that carries with it its own degree of risk, particularly in Australia where registration for auction is mandatory. And and in New Zealand, buyers can turn up and participate at an auction. But normally, our agents and and all agents in the industry would have a pretty good handle on, one, who the buyers are that are coming to the auction, who's representing them, if somebody is representing them. And then if somebody starts putting their hand up that they don't know, they're going to be pretty quickly saying, who is this person and can they actually purchase?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  And dealing with it. Yeah, exactly. And have you had any of those situations where you've been called? Calling an auction, someone's won and then you've realised, hang on a minute, who is this bloke? And then they just walk out the door and they haven't actually paid the deposit or anything?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  No, it's actually interesting you say that. In the eight thousand odd that I've done, I've never had somebody sort of turn up, bid at the auction and then walk out without paying a deposit or signing. And I think that probably goes to the point that we've made earlier, which was it's not just about the auction itself, it's about the three or four weeks leading into it to understand exactly our game plan and our strategy for auction day. And a big part of that includes understanding who the buyers are.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  So I've got a podcast episode coming out soon where I actually went to some auctions and I'm recording my observations as I go there. Now, of course, even if you've got two or three people bidding on a property, but the property doesn't meet the reserve price, then the auctioneer will start going between the buyer and the seller to try and negotiate a deal. Now, if you are a buyer, what have you seen works for them trying to negotiate this price down?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Not sure about negotiating the price down because ultimately the property is never going to sell for a cent less than what the owner wants to let it go for. That's like the ultimate decision. You've got the reserve price on the day and the reserve price is sometimes, but often not the minimum price that the owner will actually sell the property for. But the property will never sell for a cent less than what the owner wants to let it go for because the ultimate decision lies with them. However, what I would say is that if you've got a buyer that's trying to negotiate in the middle of an auction, the thing that is their friend in that situation is speed of negotiation. The longer that they take, the longer they give their competition to consider what they might do, the longer they give their competition an opportunity to say, oh, well, actually, we could

• 12:27Speaker 01

  stretch a little bit more. Why don't you call mum and why don't you call dad or do this sort of thing? Speed in negotiation is very helpful.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  And if I flip it on the other side and now thinking about you as the auctioneer, what's running through your head while you're calling an auction? What are you actually looking for?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  It's an interesting, an interesting one to stand at the front of an auction room and to almost observe how people are behaving, observe their, both their verbal, you know, interaction and their non-verbal interaction. Like, not to sort of get too carried away with myself, but I think auctioneers in general, sort of a part conductor, part commentator. And you're really, your job is to facilitate, but it's also to talk about what's going on in the auction room. But you will stand at the front of the auction room and you will be watching people's body language. And that's things from seeing their legs and arms crossed, perhaps seeing the direction that they're looking in. It might even be their posture as the auction itself progresses through. But then the number one tell that I see, and it's often from young couples in auctions,

• 13:28Speaker 01

  when they're bidding on what might be their first or perhaps their second home, is the young couple will go through the entire auction and not say a single word to each other until they get to the point that they run out of money.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And that's when they both look at each other and start talking.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Oh, that's actually a really good point. Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  But up until then, typically they're so focused on what's going on in front of them that there's no interaction between them whatsoever.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Oh, that poor young couple that missed out on another house because bloody Ed McKnight came and outbid them. No, absolutely not. The most recent auction I was bidding at, I was the first home buyer, technically. The other question that I had for you is what about other mistakes that you have seen buyers or bidders make at an auction? So we've got the couple who has got that big tail. What other mistakes do you tend to see?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I tell you what, one of the most common mistakes is, is the buyer that tries to wait until the very last minute. The buyer that thinks, I'm going to wait until it's met reserve and the auctioneer is on the third call. And just before he or she brings the hammer down, I'm going to put my hand up and get in there. And I've seen buyers miss out on property because, one, they haven't already identified themselves as a buyer. So the auctioneer may not actually know to come back to them before the property is sold. And they leave it too late. The hammer comes down and they say, well, wait a second, Mr. Or Mrs. Auctioneer, I was going to bid. It's too late. You've missed out and the property is sold. The other mistake that I sometimes see people make

• 14:58Speaker 01

  is, is over-strategising. Now, having a strategy is good. Having a strategy is important, but having an over-strategised, rigid view of how the auction may play out can be quite difficult. Because if somebody else has a plan that isn't consistent with yours, they'll come in and demolish your plan and you'll be suddenly thinking, gee, what do I do now?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Do you have any particularly memorable auctions that you think, geez, that went, that went a bit haywire or that was a bit kooky? I enjoyed that one.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I've had a few memorable auctions over the years, as you'd imagine. And, you know, sometimes they come down to either the price that was achieved or, or, you know, how much more was achieved than the owner, or even in some cases, the agent thought that they were going to see the property realised at auction. And also sometimes it's actually the personalities of the people that are bidding. And you can get some great funny interactions with people. I talked before about, you know, the fight, flight or freeze. But you also get these people that like almost come out of their shell and they're in, they're having a performance of their own and they're really enjoying it. I had one guy once and every single bid that he placed, it had to end in eight, eight, eight. Every single time.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Was he Chinese?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Possibly. And, and he, he had to do this every single time. And then he had a guy that was competing against him. And we were just fortunate enough that we had two guys with big personalities. And he was insistent that the bid wasn't going to end in eight, eight, eight. You had these two guys going at each other the whole time. It was very funny. And it was a lot of fun for the people in the room, even those that were there watching.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Surely that can string an auction out. Like, can some of these auctions take, go from the four-minute ideal scenario that Ed proposed to, you know, like ages?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  The, the longest I've had without stopping, so we talk about pausing an auction and negotiating, the longest I've had without stopping is 47 minutes.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And more than 120 bids at this particular auction. And this was just an auction that just, it started like any typical auction, you know, really, really sort of standard bidding, the competitive action from a number of buyers, but it got down to two at the very end. And we went from the sort of the fifties to the twenties to the tens, the fives, the twos, the ones, the five hundreds, the two fifties, and then the one, two, fives.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And, and we, 125 bucks a bid at the very pointy end of the auction. And it's at that point where you're really trying to give the buyer the confidence to say, get yourself out of an arm wrestle here. Get yourself head and shoulders above the competition. And, and a number of times, you know, the bidders tried that on each other, but they kept coming back and it just ground out and ground out until the very sharp end. And the point at which that buyer finally relinquished, you know, there was almost like this nervous relief in the room that like, is this thing actually over? And the hammer came down and, and the entire room obviously erupted and it was a bit of a celebration, but it was a marathon.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Imagine driving home with your wife who said she wanted that house and you let it go for a hundred bucks.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  In fact, I, I might have even said that to him.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  I'm sure you did.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  I might have even said, I don't envy your car ride home. It's not going to be fun for you. But for a hundred dollars, you could relieve yourself of all that pain.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  But it's interesting that there was the example where you said one guy wanted to end in eight, eight, eight in all his bids. And that brings us nicely into what auctioneers can and can't do. Because as an auctioneer, you can refuse a bid, right? You could say, no, we're not going up in a hundred dollar increments yet. We're still going up in $10,000 increments or $5,000 increments. So what can and can't an auctioneer legally do?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  It's a good one because often people think that if they make a bid in the auction, a bit like when you make an offer in a normal real estate transaction, that the agent is obliged to present it to the owner. In an auction, an auctioneer actually can refuse a bid on the owner's behalf. The owner gives them that right to do so before the auction. The auctioneer can actually determine the amount by which the bidding starts as well. So sometimes people will come with a strategy, oh, I'm going to open it low because they think that a low opening price means a, a low closing price. The auctioneer can simply say, no, not going to start the auction at that level. Equally, if the owner requests, the auctioneer can withdraw the property from sale before it is sold without disclosing the reserve price to the bidders. And that may

• 19:19Speaker 01

  be for a variety of reasons. And the auctioneer can place what they call a vendor bid on behalf of the vendor, but they can't make bids up. Like, they can't pretend that somebody's bidding at the back of the room. And the owner can't actually have anybody else bidding at the back of the room either. So while the auctioneer can do it and the auctioneer needs to use words like vendor bid to make it abundantly clear that that's what's happening. Who actually signs a document before the auction that says they're not going to have any friends in the crowd to pump the price up, that's fraud.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  I remember actually that we did a podcast years ago about auctions with no reserve and whether or not they worked. What's your opinion? Have you ever run one of those?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've done a number of auctions with no reserve. We've done a number of auctions with disclosed reserves as well. And I guess the comparison that you might make is that often you will also see properties that go to auction either by mortgagie or some sort of forced sale process that sometimes takes place. And quite often, those are the properties that actually get the most interest. They get the most registered buyers, they get the most competitive bidding, and that's because the buyers know that the property is going to be sold, particularly in the case of no reserve or disclosed reserve. And I liken it a bit to, you know, when you go on Trade Me and you're looking at stuff on Trade Me and you might, I don't know, let's say you're looking at an iPhone on Trade Me and you've got all of these ones with buy now prices or all of these ones

• 20:49Speaker 01

  with, you know, the price that you can buy it for. And then you see one with no reserve and it's at like $238. That one will just like end up getting a big price and it will get sold. And it's got like 30 or 40 people bidding on it. And it's because people know that if they don't bid, they're going to miss out. It's that fear of loss that, you know, plays such an important role across real estate.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  But of course, the danger is if I think, oh yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to get so much interest if I have dollar reserve and put my property on the market, you could sell the property for a dollar, potentially.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  It's certainly not a course of action that we'd recommend for a normal set of circumstances. It's normally for a very bespoke reason as to why somebody would be declaring or disclosing a no reserve auction. And that's normally, you know, a required sale on behalf of the owner or some overarching motivation that simply says to them that a sale is more important than a price. Now, for nine out of 10 or nine and a half out of 10 owners, a price is actually more important than a sale.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  And does it still get your heart rate going? And do you leave the auction and then go home and start yelling demands at your wife and kids in a quick speed, expecting them to, because you're still in the zone?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  That would be very unwise. Not recommended in my household, I can assure you of that. But, but I can, you know, it's interesting because auctions, people have this view that auctions are all about shouting and this, you know, guy or girl at the front of the room just yelling at everybody. Auctions in New Zealand and indeed in Australia are almost more conversational. Yes, there's some volume. Yes, there's some urgency. There's some variation in tone and speed. But in New Zealand and Australia, they're more conversational than what they would be in America or other parts of the world where you really do see that repetitive and high volume auction call, as it were. But, but they do get you fizzed up. At the same time, you're acutely aware that while it might be all of the things that

• 22:40Speaker 01

  we've discussed, fun, interesting, seeing all of this human sort of behaviour on display, this is somebody's home and this is somebody's prospective home. And the importance of that shouldn't be lost on, on anybody involved in the transaction.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And how many auctions did it take for you to get good and master your craft?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I don't know about that, but I think you're always, you're always learning and, and, you know, no two auctions are the same. Like no two auctions are the same, but they do follow pretty similar paths. And they are, in some ways, you know, can, can be, you can look, you can sit down and you can say, this is how I believe this one would play up. But I think, I think that by their very nature, you're learning each and every time you do one. When I first started, and I know you guys are based in Christchurch, I actually started out in Christchurch and, and I was working under a fantastic auctioneer at the time, a gentleman called Roger Dawson. And Roger was very generous to me when I first started. He used to give me all the properties he knew weren't going to sell. And so, so I got good at passing them in, I can tell you that.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking us through auctions. And if you guys are listening to this and have a question about auctions or anything in property, remember you can now leave us a voice message on the Property Academy podcast hotline. I'll drop a link down in the show notes. Click on that, leave us a voice message. We'll answer your question on the show. And over the last 20 minutes, you've learned the mistakes that bidders make at auction from the man who ran 8,000 of them, what an auctioneer is actually allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do, and whether the usual auction tricks and tips still work. Right, let's wrap it up there. But please don't forget to write, review and subscribe to the podcast. Really does help us get the message out to more people.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the Property Academy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim McKnight.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  And I'm Ajun Nicol.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  We're going to be back here tomorrow with even more daily strategies, texts and insights to help you get the most out of the New Zealand property market. Until next time.