The Page I Send Every Vendor
the Day They Book Me

Most auctioneers show up on auction day. I prefer to start much earlier than that. The moment a vendor books me, a process begins that is designed to make sure auction day goes well. Part of that process is a page I built specifically for this purpose. This is what it is and why it matters.

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This is not traditional real estate marketing. There are no stock photos of handshakes, no generic copy about maximising returns and no slick sales brochure dressed up as information. This is a working document built to serve one purpose: making sure a vendor arrives at their auction day genuinely informed, genuinely prepared and genuinely on the same side as everyone else in the room.

That sounds like a modest goal. It is not.

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How the workflow runs

The sequence is straightforward. I get the booking. I collect the client's details. I call the client, because that first conversation matters and it should happen voice to voice. Then, within hours of that call, an automated email goes out to the vendor with a link.

The link takes them to what I call the Vendor Auction Experience page.

It is sent early deliberately. Not the day before the auction. Not at the reserve-setting meeting. Early, when there is still time to shape the process, have honest conversations and make sure everyone is working from the same understanding of how this is going to go.

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What the page covers

The page walks through the full auction process from beginning to end. Legal preparation - what needs to be underway before buyers can act and why leaving it late creates problems. Settlement dates and how vendors should think about them. Conditional versus unconditional offers and what the difference actually means in an auction context. How variations to standard conditions work and when buyers typically put them forward. What happens at the auction itself, step by step, in plain language.

It covers what happens if the property sells under the hammer. And it covers what happens if it does not - because pretending that possibility does not exist is not preparation, it is avoidance.

It reinforces everything from the appraisal and the listing conversation. Not because vendors were not paying attention during those meetings. But because there is a great deal to absorb in those early conversations and having a reference point at hand makes a real difference. Vendors revisit the page. They share it with their partners. They come back to sections when questions arise. That is exactly what it is designed for.

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The reserve selector

There is an interactive element on the page that I find particularly useful. It is a reserve price tool that lets vendors explore different price points and consider how they sit relative to the market.

Nobody arrives at a reserve-setting conversation without a number already in mind. That number has been formed over weeks - from Trademe searches, from conversations at dinner parties, from the optimistic ceiling of hope. Sometimes it is well-grounded. Often it is not.

The reserve selector does not tell vendors what their reserve should be. What it does is invite them, early in the process, to engage honestly with the relationship between expectation and reality. To sit with a number and ask themselves: is this where the market actually is?

That is a conversation worth having in week one. It is a much harder conversation the night before the auction.

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Everyone already knows

There is a dynamic in property sales that every agent, auctioneer and experienced buyer understands but rarely says out loud. When a price is too high, everyone knows. The vendor knows it somewhere, even if they have not admitted it yet. The agent knows it. I know it before I have even seen the property. And the buyers know it absolutely - they will walk through and they will not bid.

The problem is not that the information is missing. The problem is that the honest conversation has not happened yet. Or worse, it has been avoided because nobody wanted to be the one to say it first.

An unrealistic reserve does not protect a vendor. It protects a number in their head from being tested. And when that number finally meets the market - on auction day, in front of everyone - the result is painful in a way that was entirely preventable.

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Process fails at the beginning

When an auction day is difficult - when a property passes in, when negotiations become tense, when a vendor is upset and feeling let down - that difficulty was almost never created on auction day. It was seeded at the start. A reserve set in hope rather than evidence. A vendor who never had the honest conversation about market conditions. An agent who wanted the listing badly enough to avoid the uncomfortable truth. A dynamic of "us and them" that had developed over weeks before a single buyer walked through the door.

I have called auctions for a long time. The smooth ones and the difficult ones are not separated by luck or by market conditions alone. They are separated by the quality of the work that happened before anyone set foot in that room. The preparation. The honesty. The willingness to have hard conversations early and let them land properly.

The Vendor Auction Experience page is part of that early work. A small piece of a larger commitment to doing this process properly from the first day.

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What I actually believe

I do not know how to do this job any other way than honestly. I have never been willing to tell a vendor what they want to hear when it is not true. I have never been willing to set a reserve I believed was unrealistic just to keep a client happy in the short term. That approach has its costs. I accept them.

I believe that if you treat people the way you want to be treated - with honesty, with care, with respect for their intelligence - the business follows. I believe that a hard conversation in week one is not something to apologise for. It is an act of genuine care for the person you are serving. And I believe that a vendor who arrives at auction day informed and prepared, with realistic expectations and a clear understanding of the process, is far more likely to have a good experience than one who has been managed and handled and carefully protected from reality.

The Vendor Auction Experience page exists because of those beliefs. Not as a marketing tool. Not as a nice thing to say I send. As a genuine attempt to do this job well.

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A question for agents

If you are an agent reading this, I am genuinely curious about something.

Is the process that precedes your auctions something you think about deliberately? Is the vendor relationship you have on auction day one you shaped from the first week, or is it one that formed on its own? And is the difficult reserve-setting conversation something you have early - or something you arrive at reluctantly when the market has already told you what you did not want to say?

I built this page because I believe the best auction outcomes are built in the first fortnight, not the last hour. If that is something that resonates, I would be genuinely interested in the conversation.