December 9, 2004
Click and bid: UW’s surplus property auctions now online, too
When the UW’s Property and Transport Services holds a public auction on Saturday, Dec. 11, some of the bidders won’t be in the room. The department has teamed up with Proxibid, an online auction company, to make it possible for people to bid on the merchandise from their computers.
It works like this: Prospective online bidders go to the Surplus Property Web site http://www.washington.edu/admin/surplus/auctions.html, and register for the auction. They can then either come to the warehouse to preview the merchandise or they can view pictures of the merchandise online. On the day of the auction, online buyers view the live auction as it is broadcast on the Internet and click to make a bid.
“This has only recently become possible because more people have high-speed Internet connections,” said Ari Kasapyan, the department’s public information specialist. “There used to be a problem of voice delay in the broadcasts, but that’s been corrected now.”
Surplus property auctions are run by UW staff who are trained auctioneers. They conduct auctions with online bidders as they would any other auction, but other surplus property employees in the room monitor online bids coming in to a computer. The person at the computer raises his or her hand to indicate an online bid. The computer screen is also projected onto the wall in the bid room so that live bidders can see those bids coming in.
“We did that to reassure the live bidders,” said Teresa Seyfried, manager of program operations for Property and Transport Services. “Sometimes if you can’t see the bidders, you think, well maybe the people running the auction are just bidding it up.”
The online auctions are a convenience for bidders, Seyfried said, making it possible for them to come to the warehouse as little as once, to pick up their merchandise. And although having online bidders has taken some getting used to, she said that regular auction goers seem to like the new service.
“We had about 80 online bidders at our last auction and the same number of live bidders.”
The University has been auctioning off its surplus property for decades, but online auctions are only the most recent of several innovations in the last few years. About four years ago, the department went from a “spot bid” system — meaning written bids — to its current oral auction format, largely because they learned they could make more money that way. Spoken bidding, Seyfried explains, encourages competition, and items tend to go for a higher price. Profits on the auctions went up about 40 percent after the switch from written to oral bids.
Then, about a year ago, Surplus Property began putting certain items up for sale on eBay. “That’s useful for exotic, unusual items,” Kasapyan said. “Items with a broad appeal do well there, as opposed to three pallets of used computer equipment.”
The online auction arrangement came about at the initiative of Proxibid. “None of us really knew about this possibility,” Seyfried said. “Webcasts of auctions are pretty new. Proxibid contacted us and made a proposal. Then we learned there were two other companies doing this so we evaluated all three of them.”
The University eventually decided to go with Proxibid, and has already done three online auctions. There is a fee to post the auction catalog, and Proxibid gets a percentage of online sales. However, online bidders pay the University a 10 percent premium, so those costs are recovered. Seyfried estimates a typical auction will gross about $18,000.
And online bidding is bound to increase the range of the auctions. The University already has had buyers from as far away as Texas and Illinois.
“We’re not sure how they found out about us because we’ve done very little marketing,” Seyfried said. “We plan to do a survey soon to try to learn how people came to participate.”
What Seyfried and Kasapyan do know is that many of the auction bidders are people for whom this is a business — people who buy the merchandise and resell it. That’s why piles of used computer equipment are among the hottest sellers at the auctions. Also popular are pieces of lab equipment such as incubators and centrifuges.
More ordinary items that appeal to individual buyers, like desks and lamps, are often sold at the department’s public store, which is held on the first and third Tuesday of every month. For the store, people come to the warehouse and look at the items, which are pre-priced.
The department also holds paper bid sales for Friday Harbor and Pack Forest, because the small number of items involved doesn’t warrant sending staff that far to conduct an auction.
As far as Seyfried and Kasapyan know, the UW is the only university conducting online auctions. Seyfried is a member of the University Surplus Property Association, and says that although it’s common for universities to sell their surplus, their manner of doing so varies a great deal.
“Some do just stores, some just auctions. Some hire auctioneers to come in. A lot more are using eBay these days,” she said. “We’re an institution that’s doing everything. We’re testing, experimenting. We’ve discovered that the variety does work, because some things sell better one way and others sell better another way.”
