learn French and start a French auction house

[longjohnmong]

This is my advice for you young people.

Look at this auction:

Cabinet des Merveilles | Drouot

Découvrez le catalogue et les résultats de la vente de Gros & Delettrez

drouot.com

The auction house gets to keep like 40% of the profits for doing almost nothing - just taking some pictures and posting them to a website. Everything is online now so who gives a fuck about the history of the auction house or their customer base. You used to have to have a reputation, to be able to fill a room with the more rich people than any other place. Now you just post pictures to the same platform every other auction house uses. It's an industry where you just convince someone to give you 40% of their shit, shit that might have been in their family for 10 generations, all because you can take pictures and post to a website. Imagine just getting to take ownership of 40% of a rich person's stuff just because you know how to list to a website.

 

[Mess]

I always thought about that, or being an art dealer. Js seems simple enough

 

[longjohnmong]

I always thought about that, or being an art dealer. Js seems simple enough

I sell antiques. I have to look for stuff to buy for under what I can sell it for then spend my money acquiring it. I'm jealous of the auction Chads who just have people find them and give them their shit.

The crazy thing is that they have this thing called the "buyer's premium" where they charge the buyer an addition 30% over the hammer price. It's ingenuous because it's basically just a way to take a bigger cut of the value of the item while making it seem like it's something between the auction house and the buyer when really it's the auction house taking more of the seller's money.

For instance, the auction house will be like "We only take 20% cut!" But then they charge the buyer's premium of 30%, so of course the buyer is going to take that into consideration when bidding. They don't give a fuck what you call it; they have an idea of how much they want to pay, whether it's 0% buyer's premium or 30% buyer's premium.

So say an item sells for $100 hammer price. They ad $30 BP and take $20 cut from $100. So the auction house gets $50 of the final selling price of $130, which is 38%, but they can say "We only take 20% cut!" Some places charge like 40% BP, and the retards who consign haven't figured out that that's coming out of their pocket so they just let the auction houses get away with it.

But it is a fun job - selling antiques. The only thing is they are quite slow to sell. I sell other shit too.