Sellers may feel auctions mean less control over sales price, realtor says

Why more Ontario properties aren’t sold by auction remains a mystery to Kingston, Ont.-area realtor Manson Slik, who has been selling real estate by auction for 22 years.

He went to his first real estate auction when he was 23 and was sufficiently impressed to join the company now called Gordon’s Estate Services, which has auctioned thousands of properties.

“All I saw was opportunity. I saw an auctioneer who just made a 10-percent commission, a buyer who got to buy a house he was happy with and a seller who, I thought, was satisfied and happy too,” he said.

“I just felt like this is the new thing. This is going to change real estate. It felt like for sure this is going to catch on. This is open, it’s transparent, everything about it is better.

“People can see who they’re bidding against, they can see how much more they’ve got to go,” said Slik, who has been teaching an auctioneer accreditation course for a decade.

For years, Gordon’s set up booths at real estate conventions, run seminars and ad campaigns.

But the business remains mostly confined to estate sales and what Slik calls “white elephant properties” — places that are unique, highly personalized or over-built.

“We were just never able to get a foothold,” he said, adding that others who tried also struggled.

Although anyone in Ontario can auction their house, Slik thinks most don’t opt for it because they perceive it as putting them at greater risk of not achieving their home’s value. A traditional listing gives sellers a sense of control over their selling price, even though a house worth $500,000 that’s listed at $800,000 isn’t likely to fetch the higher number.

Because Gordon’s is a licensed brokerage, all its auction listings are exposed on the Multiple Listings Service (MLS), but there are probably only about five companies in Ontario that are brokers and auctioneers, Slik said. He figures there are fewer than 1,000 real estate sales by auction a year in Ontario.