UK Lockdown Auctions

I see stamp auction houses are cancelling their November auctions and in many cases rescheduling them for January. Mayfair, Martello and others are continuing with single items and a few boxes. The availability of printed albums with good collections is low, resulting in super high prices for these. I noticed, while attending the last auctions of October that if there was a flurry of floor bidding on a box or album, Easylive and other online auction platform buyers piled on top. The general consensus amongst us dealers present at these auctions is that because of the impending lockdown and the restricted access in viewing this has happened. Plus most of the North being on Tier 3, folks were bidding blind and bidding because if the floor thought it must be good, then there is probably something worth bidding on. Folks are desperate for stock, or should I say something to do whilst on lock down. This has also affected ebay where I see higher than normal prices for good world albums and tasty boxes. This is just my observations, what have you all seen happen?

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Prices have definitely boomed since Covid struck, mostly as a result of old collectors returning to the hobby.

I think a lot of the traditional stamp auctions are now also attracting customers who previously bought on ebay, and who are used to buying blind -- with all that this entails, such as wildly overestimating a lot's value, not taking condition into account, and so on.

In my opinion this trend existed before COVID so it may or may not be specifically related to what we are seeing now.
Don

I think there might be supply side issues too. A lot of collections come from estates or older collectors selling out when they can't collect anymore. A lot of these folks are at high risk for Covid and don't want to have people come to their house to pick up collections and they may not be willing to ship their collections etc.

Just speculating!

K - I agree with you, but when I wrote the same thing in an earlier thread I attracted doubters.