Online and phone bidding increasing at auctions

At an outdoor Chester County auction in early April, the scene looked unchanged from 20 or even 200 years ago: A flock of several hundred bidders announced their intentions by waving paddles - simply constructed cardboard squares inked with bidding numbers.

There were no catalogs, no absentee bidding. Without a paddle, you were up the creek.

Eleven days later at Freeman's on Chestnut Street, the oldest continuing auction house in the United States, the number of live bidders amounted to three dozen - at most. More than 230 were online and at least 140 other bids came from the phones.

While live bidding is still commonplace at smaller, often rural sales, paddles are becoming passé at the big auction houses. And thanks to free online auction catalogs, the public's growing experience with online bidding (hello, eBay), and better computer security measures, so is your presence.

"The great thing about [the telephone and Internet] is that we get more bidders," Freeman's marketing director, Tom McCabe, said after the company's April 13 auction.

All told, that sale drew 450 registered bidders from Canada, China, France, Germany, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, as well as throughout the United States. In the two preceding weeks, Freeman's website drew visitors from 91 countries, according to McCabe.

Aside from the bidders "in the chairs," some of the approximately 550 winning bids came through a phone bank of a dozen Freeman's staffers who would occasionally rise in unison, like the reed section of a 1940s swing band, to signal their callers' wishes. Another Freeman's staffer was monitoring 59 online bids through Artfact Live, a three-year-old, Boston-based online bidding service where 230 people registered. And 42 more bids came through Freeman's own website.

The result? A still-life by Severin Roesen sold for $47,500 ($32,500 more than the presale estimate) to an online bidder competing against a telephone bidder. And a 167-year-old quilt drew seven telephone bidders who pushed the price to $32,500, more than five times the high presale estimate. The sale's final tally: $1.16 million.

Sotheby's BidNow program has brought "a significant increase in the number of clients worldwide," said Shannon Delage, vice president and worldwide head of Internet marketing. And since Christie's launched LIVE™ to provide real-time bidding, 28 percent of its clients bid online, up 5 percent over 2009.