TL;DR Poor up-front communications, hiding the fact that they went on vacation while our auction…read morewas active, suboptimal policies only on our auction it seemed (red letters on our auction, unlike others, saying things like DO NOT BID IF YOU CANNOT COME DURING THIS WINDOW OF TIME), over-promising and under-delivering, once auction started they stopped communicating altogether and just sent the payout and moved on. They also listed items that were literally part of the house, which we luckily got them to remove in time.
The positives: I will mention they did it at short notice, and they waved the $3500 fee to do an online auction. They combined our auction with other auctions to increase the bulk of the auction. Those things we appreciated. And, in person, his wife was nice and I tried to keep things moving to respect her time. But, the actual sale execution had some flaws.
The situation: Needed to clear out an estate to sell a house, but was left with too much furniture. Most of the other stuff got donated (and was literally trash). Many other estate-sale people turned us down. The experience started when we discovered "ezAuctions" was out of business. Then our agent mentioned "ezDownsizing" ..
In this estate there was a $20000 bedroom set (retail, 1980s, vintage Ralph Lauren), where just one of the pieces had recently sold on ebay for $8000. Most of the other stuff we knew was not that valuable. I was very skeptical.
Guy on the phone who called us back (Clay? Brian? No idea...he was The Husband) .. very pushy, said we had only 1 day to "fit it in", and also said exactly what we wanted to hear. "You've got an auction with $6000-8000 dollars easy, maybe even up to $12000 but I don't like giving numbers" ... well, he was way off. The entire auction netted $4k, and we got 60% of that, minus some odd fees that they tacked on that had to do with "no sale items" which I still to this day do not know what we paid for but it added up to another $108 we owed them.
His wife arrived and asked us "not to be there" when they took pictures. I get it, people probably tell meaningless stories about the items. It's probably super annoying. Still, it meant they made mistakes by listing parts of the house that were not to be sold at auction, like the whole house central vacuum, and light fixtures.
Probable reasons it didn't do well: house was far away from any nearby town and had a Friday afternoon 2 hour window for pickup. This was a bad oversight. Needed a Saturday pickup window. Also, they went on vacation while doing the auction. They stopped responding to our texts and messages.
If you just want stuff "gone gone gone" this is a company that will do that for you. If you want to get some value out of it, consider other options. I had been given a 50% off rental for a truck and should have driven it to Everything-But-The-House in Columbus, where the auctions are taken care of in a warehouse and the commissions are way less. (its a sliding scale where higher priced items have less commission!)
40% commission across the board: meaning on anything that sells for more than $1. And yeah, things sold for $1. There's no way to do "reserve"
In Pittsburgh, there is a similar service called Hostettlers Auctions (or something like that). I think they use the exact same software. One thing about the Pittsburgh auction house (unrelated company) is that in the fine print they say they actually bid-up on items that are not selling for much. For example I bought through them 10 radios and in the last moments they "bid up" the radios to get more value out of me. I didn't love that they did that, but now that I've been on the other side, I would have appreciated it if they had that sort of service.
I had put some stuff into the sale as well, and after I gave them $4000 worth of functional equipment and got $125, I regretted it. I should have also taken my stuff to Columbus instead of to them. What a waste. Even though I explained everything worked and came with spare parts to replace everything that could possibly break in my 3D printing lot, for whatever reason they wrote "UNTESTED MAY NOT WORK" on my auction listings and there was nothing I could do or say to stop it.
Just some tidbits:
$1200 worth of Snapper XD pro-grade lawn care equipment sold for $17
$2000 worth of 3D printing equipment sold for $200
$20000 Ralph Lauren Safari 3-piece bedroom set sold for slightly less than $2500 (mahogany matching bed, wardrobe, 21-drawer chest)
$3600 curved glass antique vintage tiger maple china cabinet sold for $131 .. I had removed the shelves and for some reason they wrote on the listing "May have to take back off to put shelves back in" but that's definitely not the case. Again, no way to correct it. May have affected sale.