Three decisions, five outcomes — and the one your clients get wrong most often.
Most of your clients have never stood in an auction room. They know the hammer might fall and the property might get passed in, and that is roughly where the knowledge stops. This issue goes inside stage two of the Auckland sale lifecycle: the room itself — the pause, the side room, the vendor bid, what leading the bidding actually earns you — the part nobody explains until they are standing in it.
Two mechanics surprise almost everyone. Bid increments are the bidder’s choice, not the auctioneer’s — if he calls for $950,000, your client can bid $905,000. And if your client is the only genuine bidder, the auctioneer may bid on the seller’s behalf to push toward reserve; that is a vendor bid, it must be announced, and your client can refuse to go above it. The outcome buyers misunderstand most is the side room: when the bidding stalls, the leading bidder is taken aside, but a price agreed there usually just becomes the new reserve and bidding reopens to the whole floor. Your client has spent their negotiating position setting a number everyone else now gets to bid against.
The adviser’s checkpoints come before the room. Finance must be firm, not indicative — every bid is unconditional, with no finance condition to fall back on. The walkaway number gets agreed at the kitchen table before auction day, it does not get revealed, and it does not move in the side room. If the property is passed in, the leading bidder still holds the cards: an unconditional offer at a known price is hard to beat, and a rival usually needs to be $50,000 to $100,000 clear on a short timeframe before the seller swaps.
