Everything!!! We asked him to auction the remainder of my mother's estate and basically had it…read morestolen from myself and my sister. It has been 2 years and we have never seen 1 red cent from the merchandise he removed from the house! I would sue, except that would put us further in the hole and we trusted so much that we didn't get an appraisal of the items before turning them over for auction. So, I would not have a realistic price to ask for in a lawsuit.

When looking for auctioneer services in Southern Illinois, I do not recommend David Watson Auction…read moreServices aka (Bud's Auction Barn) out of Johnston City, IL. I hired this company for a fairly large onsite estate sale back in June 2018. They made it all sound great in the beginning, but as the preparation went along things started going bad. The sale was very chaotic, as the sale was still going on people were bringing their vehicles in to pick up what they purchased and ran over boxes of stuff that was still to be sold. While prescreening the sale items, some of items were stolen. Note: If you have a sale, hire people to work security. After the sale I was left with a mine field of items that were sold, but David allowed the buyers to take only what they wanted and leave the rest all over the yard. I was told by David and his wife Molly that they would help clean up the yard. Well, as soon as they packed up their stuff, I didn't see any of them for 2 days. While I was cleaning up the yard, I found that they tried to sell the garage door openers, our family crest, personal papers, and pictures of our family. They charge a set amount for advertising, but I was handed about 200+ of the flyers to also hand out. So, they made money while I did part of the work. I was told that I could check in a couple of weeks after the auction to find out how much our sale made and to get a copy of the sales readout. When I stopped by Bud's Auction Barn, Molly (David's wife and bookkeeper), came across as being offended that I was checking on our money. She told me that she handed all the information over to her accountant/attorney and that she didn't remember how much the total was. Even though she inputted all of the figures and had the total, but would not tell me the amount. She told me that they have done bigger auctions than ours and that nobody has ever called or asked for a total prior to the clients receiving their money. Apparently I wasn't supposed to have concerns over our property or want to know how much the sale was for. And God forbid they break anything, because they will not take responsibility for any of it. Example: One of their relatives drove Dave's tractor with forks on it (I witnessed him behind our barn trying to figure out how to work the controls), and picked up a metal lathe and spun it over and dropped it on the concrete floor busting it. The estate lost money, because as stated above they wouldn't take responsibility even though it was one of their people who did it. Molly and Dave took all of the money from the sale and put it in their bank account. Their contract stated that it would take up to 60 days for our money to be sent out to us. I voiced my concerns over the 60 days many times and Dave and Molly both kept reasuring me. Well, it was well over that for all the heirs to receive their money from the sale. The checks were supposed to go out on August 15th and for some reason it took 9 days for me to finally receive mine. The envelope was only going 30+ miles from where it was sent out from. And one of the other heirs' check was dated August 27th. Again, I will not recommend this company to anyone.