Local Auction Houses vs House Contents Sales: Where to Find Bargains

This one is written for people who already know their way round a saleroom. If you check the catalogues most weeks, if you have a favourite general sale and a view on which local auctioneer describes condition honestly, you are not the reader who needs the basics explained. You are the reader who wants to know whether a house contents sale is worth adding to the rounds or whether it is the same stock wearing a different hat.

Short answer: it is a second source, not a replacement. Your saleroom is still the right place for a good deal of what you buy. What follows is where the two overlap, where they genuinely do not, and what a winning bid costs once everything is added on.

What your local auction house does that nothing else does

Worth stating plainly, because a lot of comparison writing on this subject quietly rubbishes auctions to make its own case. We are not going to.

• Expertise attached to the object. Somebody has looked at that clock, dated it, and put an estimate on it. You may disagree, and that disagreement is where a lot of the money is made, but the work has been done.
• Published results. Sold prices are real market evidence, which no other secondhand channel gives you so readily.
• Genuine rarity turns up. Specialist and better single items are deliberately sent to salerooms. That is the correct decision for the seller and it is why the hunt works.
• The chance of buying under. A quiet Tuesday, a poorly photographed lot, a description that missed something. This is the reason you go, and it does not exist where prices are fixed in advance.

None of that is available at a house contents sale, and we would rather say so than oversell. If you are hunting one specific rare thing, keep your catalogue habit exactly as it is.

What never reaches the saleroom floor

Here is the gap. A saleroom takes what is worth its handling costs. Everything else in a house, and it is most of a house by volume, is either grouped into a box lot or disposed of before the sale. So the things you never see catalogued are the things a family actually lived with: the good extending ladder, the linen press full of tablecloths, the workshop drawers, the decent pans, the pair of bedside lamps that match, the picture frames.

At a contents sale that material is still in the house, still where it lived, and still priced individually. If your buying runs to furnishing, decorating, restoring or reselling ordinary useful things rather than chasing single named pieces, that is a supply of stock you currently do not have access to. The bulk lot route and what it discards is covered separately in house clearance auctions versus house contents sales.

There is a second thing you get, which is context. Seeing a piece in the room it has been in for forty years, next to the rest of the household, tells you things a lot number on a concrete floor does not. Provenance is a grand word for it, but the ordinary version is simply knowing what sort of house it came out of.

What a winning bid actually costs

You already know this and you have already made peace with it, but it is worth laying out side by side because the comparison people make in their heads is usually hammer price against sticker price, and that is not the comparison.

We are deliberately not putting numbers on the premium, because it varies by house and by whether you bid in the room or online, and yours will be on your saleroom's terms page. The point is only that the true cost of an auction purchase is assembled from several parts and the true cost of a contents sale purchase is one number on a sticker. That single fact changes how fast you can decide in a room, which we get into in how items are priced and what is on the sticker.

Running both: what to buy where

The people who do best out of this treat the two as different aisles of the same shop rather than rivals. Roughly:

• Named, signed, hallmarked, rare or specialist. Saleroom, every time. That is where those items are sent and where the expertise to price them sits.
• Brown furniture in quantity. Either, and the saleroom is often cheaper, but a contents sale lets you see it in daylight in a domestic room, which flatters or condemns a piece far more accurately than a warehouse.
• Sets you want part of. Contents sale. Buying two of the six chairs is straightforward when everything is individually priced and impossible when the six are one lot.
• Household, garden, workshop, kitchen, linen. Contents sale, comfortably. Most of this never gets catalogued at all.
• Anything you need to measure first. Contents sale, because you will be standing in front of it with a tape measure and no clock running.
• Anything you are content to gamble on. Saleroom. The gamble is the appeal and fixed prices remove it.

Which of your habits transfer

Most of them, usefully. Checking joints, looking underneath, spotting a replaced back leg, knowing roughly what a thing makes: all of that is exactly as valuable in somebody's front room as it is at a viewing, and it puts you well ahead of the average visitor. Our notes on buying furniture and antiques at a house contents sale assume rather less prior knowledge than you have, but the checks are the same ones.

Three habits misfire, though, and they catch out experienced auction buyers more than beginners.

1. Waiting. There is no bidding to hold back from. If you put a thing down to think about it, the next person through the door buys it.
2. Negotiating. The sticker price is the price, for everyone, in every slot. Reductions happen to the whole sale as it runs on rather than item by item at the door.
3. Leaving a bid. Nothing can be reserved, bid on in advance or bought remotely. It is in person on the day or not at all, which makes your choice of time slot the closest equivalent to a bidding strategy you have.

At an auction the risk is that somebody outbids you. At a contents sale the risk is that somebody got there first. One is solved by money, the other by booking an earlier slot.

Slots are the mechanic to understand before your first one, since they decide both what you see and what you pay. They are explained in full in how timed entry tickets work.

The practical test is simply whether anything decent is on near you. Browse the upcoming sales and look at a listing or two the way you would read a catalogue. Each one carries room photographs and a walkthrough video, which is rather more than most general sale catalogues give you, and you can judge in a couple of minutes whether it is worth the drive.

Common questions

Are contents sale prices set by someone who knows what they are doing?

They are set before the sale by whoever is running it, with the aim of selling the house out rather than achieving a top price on any single piece. That means the pricing is generally sensible and occasionally, on the things nobody specialises in, generous to a buyer who does.

Do dealers go to these?

Increasingly, yes, for the same reason you are reading this. What they cannot do is outbid you, so the advantage they hold is an early slot and a fast eye, not a bigger budget.

Is it worth going late instead?

It depends what you buy. Late slots see reduced prices on what is left, which suits volume buying and suits anyone flexible about what they come home with. See what happens to items that do not sell for how that works in practice.

How often will there be one near me?

Less often than your saleroom's sale calendar, because sales happen when somebody moves, downsizes or deals with an estate rather than on a fixed cycle. Alerts are the answer, and how to find house contents sales near you covers setting them up.

I run a saleroom rather than buy at one. Does this affect me?

Possibly, since the contents you currently turn down or skip are exactly what this format sells. We have set out the case in how auction houses can use StickerSale between sales.

Where does this sit against everything else?

Start with what a house contents sale is and how it works for the format end to end.