D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
The Little Auction House That Could
In its homey barn in the Mimbres, Desert West Auctions combines classic auctioneering and the latest technology to bid for business. Plus: Walgreen's breaks ground, Daily Press drops Saturday, Penny Park orphaned, Mountain View Market helps T or C, and more.
Got a collection of vintage ceramic-headed dolls you're tired of dusting every week? Looking to sell an unusual item, like a beheading sword? Or perhaps you're looking to buy some fine American Indian jewelry or diamond rings at a good price. Come to auction!
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Jane Coogan, who co-owns Desert West
Auction with her husband, Bob, stands on the auction stage with the husband-wife
team of Sylvia Stearns, auction coordinator, and Keith Stearns, auctioneer,
while assistant Susan Murphy displays a piece of pottery the company
will auction. (Photo by Donna Clayton Lawder) |
Jane and Bob Coogan, proprietors of Desert West Auction in the rural Mimbres Valley, have been hooking up buyers and sellers for 15 years. Cowboy memorabilia, fine art, antique furnishings, coin collections and just plain useful everyday, well, stuff — the Coogans have sold it all, and then some.
Buyers bid online live via the Internet and phone in from around the country and the world. They join absentee bidders who've named their prices ahead of time and about 75 live members in the gallery, one action-packed weekend every month.
The Coogans and their experienced team have had great success hooking up buyers and sellers. And, yes, they really have sold an entire collection of 500 antique dolls and a beheading sword.
"We did real well for her," Jane Coogan recalls of the lady who consigned the lot of dolls for sale through Desert West Auction. Coogan explains how she put out a limited number of the antique beauties for bid each month: "You don't want to just flood the market with them all at once. They lose their uniqueness, their individuality if you do that. People can't appreciate them for what they are. They can't even see what's there if you put them out all at once.
"It took us a number of auctions to go through all those dolls and then we sold the cabinets, too. She had these beautiful wooden cabinets she displayed them in. The whole sale took six or eight months to complete."
Sitting in her small office off the main auction hall — a gloriously cluttered "command central," if you will — Coogan gives a bit of the company's history and details the basics of auctions.
"We started with an outside auction, under a tent out back," she recalls with a small laugh. "We have done on-site estate auctions, you know, where you sell everything in the house for them. Now everything comes here, is sold here, in the gallery."
The phone rings. It's a woman looking to sell a painting through Desert West Auction. Coogan grabs a notepad and starts scribbling the answers to a litany of questions: Who is the artist? Is the work an original? What medium? What kind of painting? Is it framed?
Satisfied that she has enough to do some research and place a value on the artwork, Coogan promises to call the seller back within two days and hangs up.
"When we first started out, we had to go pretty far and wide looking for goods," Coogan says. "Now people call us up and tell us what they've got. We've sold for some clients multiple times."
It's no wonder. Reaching out to potential buyers through several means, Desert West Auction often sells over 80 items per hour, Coogan says.
And it's not just the goods pipeline that has changed over the years to make this little company a global auction powerhouse. The ways of bringing in buyers have evolved and grown to include many methods of bidding and all the latest technologies.
"We added eBay five years ago," Coogan says. "On auction day, you can have a number of absentee bidders who have named their price, how high they'll go, in advance of the auction. Then you've got the people in the gallery, right here in the room." She gestures out to the big hall. "We have clerks taking bids over the phones and others taking bids on computer from people over the Internet."
She describes how the action goes back and forth, someone in the audience raising his or her hand to signal, the auctioneer announcing the new price, then a clerk on computer or telephone raising a hand to enter the offers of long-distance bidders.
"The Internet has really changed things. It makes my little world here in Mimbres much bigger," she says with a wide-eyed smile and shake of her head. "At our last auction, we had 650 online bidders from around the US and 17 foreign countries!"
Coogan says Desert West Auction has a well-established clientele of bidders around the globe, noting particularly active repeat buyers in Spain and France.
"And my eBay auction is different from just regular eBay," she adds. "It's a live auction. There's some guy out there, in his pajamas and on his computer, but he's bidding live with us, interacting with the audience here through the clerk taking Internet bids."
Throughout the company's quaint but huge auction barn, staffers are setting up for the next month's auction — labeling the treasures strewn out on long tables, photographing them to make up a catalog and to display on eBay. Goods sold at the most recent auction sit off to the sidelines, being boxed for shipping to the successful bidders, their new owners.
For its 30 percent commission fee on the selling price, Coogan says the company does a lot of work to promote and sell the goods. "We list, photograph, advertise, catalog and display each item. And of course we advertise the auction itself," she adds, handing over a flyer with the date of the next auction highlighted.
Coogan says people come to the auction barn and sit in the audience — rather than, say, staying at home in pajamas and bidding via computer — because of the entertainment value.
"Oh, it's fun! It's just a fun atmosphere. They come for the entertainment. They come for the free cake. Yes, we have free cake," she adds with a laugh. More substantial food is available, sold through a catered concession, for those who grow hungry as the bidding goes on and the hours roll by.
Coogan recounts some of the more unusual and interesting items Desert West has auctioned over the years, like the entire stock of a store that closed in Truth or Consequences. "It filled our entire barn!"
They once sold a fleet of some 50 vehicles for the Lordsburg police department.
"There was an 18-wheeler truck in that lot, too," she says. "The truck alone went for $38,000."
There have been some surprises, she adds, notably a small, antique pocketknife that commanded a large price.
"It didn't look like much and I considered just putting it in a bin with a $5 price tag," Coogan recalls. "But we put it out there, put the image on eBay, to see what the interest was and how people would value it."
The little knife — which turned out to be a rather rare Winchester — got plenty of interest. "Well, we opened the bidding at $1,500," Coogan says. "It sold for around $1,700! This little knife I didn't think would fetch much more than $5!"