Thursday, October 29, 1998

Going ... going ... sold to man with the 28800 modem!

By ALLEN G. BREED Associated Press

Imagine a huge yard sale, except the world is the neighborhood, the browsers set the prices, and the goods being offered aren't just junk.

A table of Beanie Babies is right next to an heiress' personal jewelry collection. A first edition of "The Scarlet Letter" is there alongside "Blade Runner" comic books.

There's the car Prince Charles gave to Diana as an engagement present. And over in the corner is a 550-pound bipolar dynamo built by Thomas Edison.

To shop at this giant bazaar you'll need one thing besides a credit card: a computer with a modem. This +auction+ is in cyberspace.

"This is just as exciting as going to a Sunday morning flea market," says antiques dealer Sandra Wright, co-owner of The Mill in Sandy Hook, Conn., and an investor in eHammer LLC, an +online+ +auction+ service that just started in August. "That hunting and collecting and going-to-find-a-treasure element is still there."

People have been able to place bids at traditional +auctions+ via the Internet for a couple of years. But with the advent of Internet-only +auctions+, the computer has become the +auction+ house, and anyone with something to sell can be an auctioneer.

Kenyata Sullivan of Wilmington, N.C., quit his traveling rock band last year to care for his ailing grandmother. While pecking around on the computer one day, he stumbled across an +online+ +auction+ service.

His grandmother is better now, but Sullivan is in no hurry to get back on the road.

"I could go back out and get a day job," says Sullivan, who watched an album he bought for 50 cents at the Salvation Army sell for hundreds of dollars on the Internet. "But I'm making like between $1,200 and $1,700 a week. So it's, like, why?"

Antiques dealer Mary Jasso asked herself the same thing. When she compared the monthly bills for her family's Jamestown, Calif., shop with the receipts from +online+ auctioneering, it was no contest.

She closed the shop in August.

"It doesn't make sense to stick something on the wall for three years and have nobody buy it when I can put it on eBay (Internet +auction+ service) and in seven days it's gone - and went for triple what you had it on the wall for," she says.

After 30 years in the business, she insists, +online+ +auctions+ are "a whole new ball game."

Consider the numbers. San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc. boasts on its Web site that it has taken more than 80 million bids on 21 million items since going +online+ three years ago. Company spokeswoman Kristin Seuell says eBay has about 850,000 registered users.

The company posts items for sale on its Web site, with photos and descriptions. Bids are updated constantly so buyers can watch the activity in real time.

There are three-, five- and seven-day +auctions+, offering everything from antiques, toys and coins to items in a special Elvis site called "All The King's Things." There's also a feedback forum, where dissatisfied customers can post gripes about a seller (a sufficiently negative rating gets them booted off the site).

"You can watch something, and no one will bid on it," says Sullivan, the guitarist, "and then in the last five minutes it will go from nothing to hundreds of dollars."

Or even more. In one recent sale, bidding for a BMW 533i started at $1,800, a great price for the German car - 15 years old, 76,000 miles, one owner.

Though new to +online+ +auctions+, Alan Bauman saw an opportunity. With the monthlong +auction+ nearly over, nickel-and-dime bidding by a couple of guys with the handles "Bigboat" and "Rimspoke" had only raised the price $90.

It's hard to read a poker face in cyberspace. But on Aug. 13, with just minutes left in the +auction+, Bauman decided to make a move. He upped the price by $110.

"I thought that hopefully would discourage other people," says Bauman, a software engineer from Allentown, Pa. Bigboat quit after another $20, but Rimspoke decided to call Bauman's bluff.

For the next 28 minutes, he and Bauman duked it out - 14 bids in all, three times the previous month's activity, a sprint finish to the marathon.

"I'm saying, 'Doesn't that guy have any work to do? Somebody ought to come and get him and call him to a meeting so he won't have access to his keyboard,' " Bauman recalls.

At 10:29:36 a.m., Rimspoke made another $20 push, bringing the price up to $2,500. Bauman upped it to $2,600 at 10:31:43 and headed for the bathroom in disgust. "I said enough was enough," Bauman says.

But when he got back to his computer, there was an e-mail telling him he was the proud owner of the white, four-door Beemer with the blue leather interior.

To join the +auction+, Bauman had logged on to www.littlegarage.com. That's The Little Garage in Queens, N.Y., where owner Matt Meng and his staff have been fixing BMWs for 17 years. Along the way, Meng has also helped would-be sellers hook up with would-be buyers.

"I've always played Cupid, I guess," he says. "The Internet just narrows everybody's backyard."

There are many +auction+ specialty shops on the Web's Main Street.

Naturalhistoryauction.com of Ithaca, N.Y., specializes in minerals, fossils, dinosauria and meteorites. Its inaugural +auction+ in August featured a piece of the moon and a hadrosaur egg.

Rob Elliott scored two meteorites for his collection without leaving home. Elliott "attended" the +auction+ in his bathrobe and dropped out for a spot of tea every now and then.

"My computers are in my workshop at the bottom of my garden, about 100 yards from my house, so it was pretty weird rejoining an +auction+ in New York from the solitude of Scotland at 4 a.m. on a dark, wet and wild night," says Elliott, a 37-year-old self-employed electrical engineer who lives in Scotland's "Silicon Glen."

"Believe it or not," he says, "the main problem is avoiding treading on the hedgehogs."

What else is at +auction+ on the Web?

Needlework pillows, autographed photos of Lady Bird Johnson, letters from Bette Davis. All of those things were left behind when actress Mildred Dunnock died in 1991.

Her daughter, Linda McGuire, offered the items for sale through eHammer, a New Haven, Conn., company run by Fred Giampietro, who as an antiques dealer sold many items to Dunnock.

"She was a great +auction+ goer and great rag picker and junk store goer," McGuire says. "So I think she would love having them sold the way she got a lot of them."

Even Sotheby's, which opened shop in London 254 years ago with an +auction+ of "several Hundred scarce and valuable Books in all branches of Polite Literature," is getting into the +online+ +auction+ business.

The illustrious +auction+ house staged its first Internet-only +auction+ in July, a books and manuscripts sale that included first editions of Hawthorne and Poe, and a collection of Time covers signed by their subjects. It generated $65,000.

The click of a mouse will not replace the fall of a gavel, though.

"I don't want to be replaced by a computer quite yet, but I have to say I believe in them," says David Redden, a Sotheby's executive vice president and auctioneer of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate. "For certain kinds of property and certain kinds of price levels, it's absolutely appropriate to offer this material to buyers on the Internet."

Redden sees the Internet as more supplement than replacement.

Michael Fassnacht sees a hybrid. He is projects manager for LiveBid LLC in Seattle, which brings live and virtual +auctions+ together. "You hear the auctioneer's call; you hear them acknowledge the Internet bids," says Fassnacht, noting that 41 percent of the items sold at one recent +auction+ went to +online+ bidders.

Cathi Casper, director of Naturalhistoryauction.com, remembers traveling the backroads of Texas as a child with her grandfather, an auctioneer. He'd be amazed at the changes in his business, she says. "I think he'd get a kick out of it."