Heritage Auction

[Heritage Sports]

The official Heritage policy is to avoid being dragged in to protracted bulletin board conflicts, but, just this once, we’ll dispense with tradition. I’ll try to keep it brief and hopefully clarify a few of the main issues here.

First, to address the original poster’s comments, there are a few facts which were rather conveniently left out of his commentary. We have counted his emails to Heritage over the past six months. The total: over 120, just to the director of the Sports department alone. We obviously cannot count the telephone calls during this time, but it’s in the dozens. Once he began to harass our executive team, which oversees over $600 million in annual sales, we made a simple business decision that we couldn’t afford to maintain the relationship. Think about it—we have over half a million registered members. Imagine if every one of them was such a drain on resources. The endless emails and phone calls to our Chairman on the topic the original poster discusses represented the final straw, not the cause. There have been other issues with this client as well, but there is no need to elaborate to the public on this.

We’re more troubled, however, by the ongoing mischaracterization of Heritage house bids as shill bidding, as it is far more potentially harmful than one disgruntled client with an abundance of free time. The distinction is so clear to us, and to most people within the hobby, that perhaps we have failed to spell it out in its simplest terms. So, if you’ll allow me, here is the difference between Heritage’s policy of placing house bids, and the illegal practice of shill bidding:

1) Placing house bids in one’s own auction. This is what Heritage does. We place bids on material at the price we would be willing to pay if someone came up to our table at a card show wanting to sell. This is done a week before the auction closes, long before the competitive final bidding has even begun. We bid in our competitors’ auctions as well. We win very little because we only bid wholesale prices.

2) Shill bidding. This is done to intentionally raise the bid price on consigned lots, and done with no interest in actually buying the lot. It is done after serious bidding has begun, not before. Heritage does not do this. Again, we place no bids in the final week of the auction, and we never have any knowledge of what the left/absentee bids are.

3) House owned items. Heritage does own some of the material in our auctions, typically less than 10% of the material. If Heritage places a bid on an item that Heritage owns, then it shows up as a reserve on the item, not a bid.

Everybody loves a scandal, we understand, but putting a $1700 bid on a $4000 Babe Ruth autograph a week before an auction closes just isn’t going to qualify. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions if this distinction isn’t as simple as most people believe it is.