AUCTION GUIDES · 4 MIN READ
Selling at auction
Most auction content is written for buyers. This is written for the person standing at the back of their own living room, watching a stranger sell their house.
Who is this cluster for?
Vendors who are considering an auction, are already in an auction campaign, or have just been passed in and need to decide what happens next. Every guide here is written from the auctioneer’s side of the room rather than the buyer’s.
There is a lot of auction content in Australia and almost all of it is written for buyers. How to register. How to bid. What to do when the hammer falls. That content exists because buyers search for it in enormous volume, and because it is easy to write.
Vendors get much less, and the parts they get least of are the parts that decide the outcome. How the reserve number is actually arrived at. What is really being discussed in the huddle. What your options are at 11.40am when the bidding has stopped $80,000 short. Those are the moments where a vendor either holds their position or gets managed into someone else’s.
Ben’s insightI have called more than 2,000 auctions. The single most common thing I have watched go wrong is not the bidding. It is the reserve conversation that happened in a kitchen forty minutes earlier, when the vendor was tired, outnumbered, and being asked to make a six-figure decision in ten minutes.
What is in this cluster
These guides are being published in order of how much they change a vendor’s outcome. The ones marked as coming are in the queue.
| # | Guide | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | How to set your reserve price The number that decides whether your house sells on the day, and how it should be arrived at. | Published |
| 02 | Auction vs private treaty Which method genuinely suits your property, and which one suits the campaign that is being sold to you. | Published |
| 03 | What actually happens on auction day Minute by minute, from the vendor’s side of the room. | Published |
| 04 | Passed in at auction: what now The highest-anxiety hour in a campaign, and the decisions that follow it. | Published |
| 05 | Vendor bids explained What a vendor bid is, when it can be used, and how buyers read it. | Published |
| 06 | Auction rules by state Registration, cooling-off, reserves and deposits compared across the states. | Published |
| 07 | The Victorian reserve price changes What is changing for Victorian vendors and when. | Coming |
| 08 | What an auctioneer costs A line item most vendors never see itemised. | Published |
Guides are added to this index as they publish. Nothing is linked here before it is live, so every link on this page resolves.
Start with the reserve
If you read one thing before your auction, read how to set your reserve price. The reserve is the only number in the entire campaign that you control outright, and it is the number most often set under time pressure with the least information in front of you.
If your auction has already run and the property did not sell, go straight to passed in at auction. The 48 hours after a pass-in matter more than most vendors realise, and the advice you get in that window is not always aligned with what is best for you.
Where auctions sit in the wider picture
An auction is a method of sale, not a strategy. The strategy question sits above it: what the property is worth, what the campaign costs, and what you keep at the end. Those are covered elsewhere on this site.
- What is my house worth, which is the input to every reserve conversation
- What it costs to sell a house, including the auctioneer and campaign spend an auction adds
- The commission calculator, for what a percentage-based fee actually costs you at your price point
- Settlement day explained, for what happens after the hammer falls
Not sure auction is the right method?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Williams
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Ben spent 15+ years as a licensed estate agent and conducted over 2,000 auctions before founding Unreserved. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Property & Valuation) from RMIT and is licensed across VIC, NSW, QLD, SA, and WA.