Five Auction House Mistakes That Cost New Collectors

I have been watching new collectors make the same five mistakes in auction rooms for twenty-five years, and I have made all of them myself at various points, so this is a piece written from experience rather than pretending to have been born with the knowledge. What follows is what I actually see, in order of how much money each mistake typically costs.

Mistake one: forgetting the buyer's premium exists

Buyer's premiums have crept up steadily over the last twenty years. In 2005 the standard rate at major London auction houses was around 12 percent. By 2015 it was 20. By 2026, at the biggest houses, the tiered premium runs from 26 to 32 percent for most lots, plus VAT on the premium in the UK, and often plus a small internet-bidding surcharge if you are online.

The practical effect is that a lot with a hammer price of 500 pounds will actually cost you somewhere between 640 and 720 pounds by the time you have paid the premium and VAT on it. If you bid up to your budget on the hammer price, you overspend by 25 to 40 percent on every purchase. Repeat that across five lots at a single sale and you have overspent by the price of a sixth lot.

The fix is to work out your maximum bid backwards from your budget. If you can afford to spend 500 pounds total on a lot, and the premium is 26 percent, then your maximum hammer price is 397 pounds. Round down, not up. Write it in your catalogue before the sale starts. Do not calculate in your head while bidding.

Mistake two: bidding on a lot you have not physically examined

Online bidding has made this mistake easier and more expensive. Photographs, however good, do not show every condition issue on a piece of furniture, and the standard auction house condition report is written by a cataloguer under time pressure who has looked at the piece for perhaps two minutes.

I once bought a Georgian tallboy at online auction, based on excellent photographs and a condition report that mentioned "minor age-related wear and one small repair to a drawer front". When it arrived the tallboy had a genuine minor repair, as described, but it also had a completely rebuilt back panel using modern plywood, which the photographs had not shown and the condition report had not mentioned. The piece was still worth something, but it was worth about half what I had paid for it.

The fix is straightforward. If you cannot get to the viewing yourself, either do not bid, or bid substantially below your maximum to allow for hidden issues, or pay a specialist to view the lot on your behalf. Specialists doing view-by-proxy work charge 20 to 50 pounds a lot at country auctions and it is money well spent on anything over 300 pounds hammer price.

Mistake three: getting carried away in the room

This is the classic mistake and the hardest to avoid, because the auction room is designed to make you get carried away. The pace of the bidding, the physical presence of other bidders, the auctioneer's manner, and the atmosphere of the room all contribute to what behavioural economists call auction fever.

You go in intending to bid to 400 on a lot. Bidding reaches 400. You raise your paddle at 420 because it is only 20 more than your maximum. You raise again at 450 because you have already gone past your limit and might as well see what happens. Somewhere around 620 you win the lot, at 50 percent over your intended maximum, and you carry the piece home wondering what happened.

What happened is that your emotional systems overrode your planning. This is not a moral failure, it is a normal human response to the situation, and it happens to experienced buyers too. The fix is a physical rule: write your maximum on the catalogue in ink, and do not bid above it, ever. If you feel yourself wanting to bid above it, put the catalogue down and walk to the back of the room. The lot will sell to someone else and you will forget about it within a week. This is not always true but it is true often enough to be worth remembering.

Mistake four: not registering for the sale in time

This one costs you nothing when it happens but wastes an entire day. Country auction houses often require you to register with proof of ID before you can bid, and some require a deposit that has to clear. If you show up on the morning of a sale expecting to register and bid, you may find that registration closed the previous day.

Online bidding has similar issues. Some houses require online registration 24 or 48 hours before the sale, some check your ID against a payment method that has to be verified, and some cap the number of new bidders they accept per sale. If you have travelled to view a piece and cannot bid on it because your registration did not clear in time, that is a wasted day and a lost opportunity.

The fix is to register a week ahead for any sale you might bid at. Not two days, not the day before, but a week. This gives time for administrative issues to resolve and for you to change your mind without cost.

Mistake five: bidding on things you do not know how to sell

This is the deep mistake, and it is the one that separates people who build sensible collections from people who accumulate stuff. Every piece you buy at auction is also, eventually, a piece you or your heirs will need to sell or give away. If you cannot articulate who the eventual buyer of a piece will be, and what makes it worth their money, you are buying without an exit.

An enthusiast collecting eighteenth-century pewter tankards has an exit, because there is a specialist market for eighteenth-century pewter tankards that will still exist in fifty years. A buyer who has picked up an interesting Victorian object because it caught their eye at a sale, without any idea of the category it sits in or who else collects it, has no exit. When they die or move house or lose interest, the object goes back to the same auction market, and often sells for less than they paid, because they were the only person in the room who wanted it that day.

The fix is uncomfortable: buy less, and buy more deeply within categories you understand. A collection of thirty pieces in one category is worth more than 300 pieces spread across thirty categories, both financially and in terms of what you learn from owning it.

None of these mistakes are unique to any specific category, and the same rules apply whether you are buying Staffordshire figures, period card tables, or vintage casino chips. Auction rooms are efficient machines for transferring goods from patient sellers to impulsive buyers, and the price of being on the wrong side of that transfer is real. Category: Starting a Collection.