SoldOnline’s online auction platform has a couple of neat features to help drive up the final sales price and incentivize interested parties to jump in and bid!
If you’ve ever had bidding stall on a property just shy of the reserve, you’re going to love these clever tweaks that encourage potential buyers to throw in just one more bid (again, and again, and again…). Or a feature that allows the highest bidder to see the reserve and instantly buy the property. SoldOnline’s unique end-of-auction features can help you meet or exceed your reserve price more often, prevent properties from passing in, and improve your clearance rates.
Final Call:
The ‘Final Call’ period starts in the final 3 minutes of an auction. Every new bid that occurs during ‘Final Call’ resets the auction clock back to 3 minutes. This ensures interested parties always have time to respond with their own highest bid. And if bidding has blown way past their budget? 3 minutes can be an awfully long time for a buyer to feel the emotion (and the sting) of a property slipping through your fingers. You’ll be surprised how often a motivated buyer can find an extra few grand for just ‘one more bid’. We’ve seen this occur time and time again, which is great for the vendors, but buyers have also reported they are equally happy to have this extra time to think.
An onsite auction running at a tearaway pace can certainly extract extra bids. However, the very nature of bidders operating in the comfort of their own environment and with more time to think has resulted in numerous cases where bidding has continued well past the official end time – in one case bidding extended more than 2 hours past the official end time!
Exclusive Negotiation:
Another unique feature of our platform is if the auction does pass in. In this case, the highest bidder alone gets the chance to see the reserve and is given an exclusive 60min period to negotiate a final price and to buy the property instantly under auction conditions. I built this feature in because as an auctioneer, I’ve seen the bidding stall just shy of the reserve time after time. In a traditional auction, when a property is struggling to reach the reserve, smart would-be buyers will just stand back and let the property pass in without placing a single bid, knowing the disappointing result will make the vendors more likely to accept a cheeky cut-price offer afterwards.
Our system removes any strategic advantage potential buyers might obtain by ‘fence-sitting’ and letting the property pass in; instead, it gives all interested buyers a powerful incentive not just to jump in and bid, but to keep bidding until they have outbid the competition – it encourages them to bid as if the reserve has been met and the property is officially on the market because technically, it is – just for the highest bidder only.
This means the reserve is more likely to be met (and exceeded), and even if it’s not, you’ll still have a much better idea of how motivated your potential buyers are heading into negotiations than you would with a traditional auction – and that’s only if the highest bidder doesn’t just instantly snap up the property at the reserve when it’s offered to them after the property is passed in.
If you want to improve your clearance rates (and what agent doesn’t?), SoldOnline is an invaluable tool to have in your sales kit.
