Live auction still a hallmark for 100-year-old J.L. Todd
Rome’s landmark J.L. Todd Auction Company is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2017.
CEO Randy Land, the late J.L. Todd’s step-son, and longtime company leaders Frank Coker, president, and Jerry Hammond, senior vice president, are working with Land to celebrate the occasion by holding to the live auction tradition that was started by C.A. “Buck” Todd in 1917.
In an era where internet auctions are becoming increasingly popular, the management team at J.L. Todd Auction makes it pretty clear they like to do business the old-fashioned way. They prefer live auctions where they can look their bidders in the eye and use a combination of interpersonal relationships and a little bit of cajoling to run up the bids to get the most money possible for their clients.
Buck Todd started the company 100 years ago, and at one time, had Lon Worsham as his partner. By the mid 1940s Todd turned the business over to his son, J.L. Todd who ran it for decades prior to his death in April of 2008 at the age of 86.
Hammond joined the firm in 1977, following in his father’s footsteps. Coker came on board in 1989, four years after Land joined the family business.
In the old days, there weren’t a lot of auctions companies in Georgia.
Randy Land (from left), CEO at J.L. Todd Auction; Jerry Hammond, senior vice president; and Frank Coker, president, review a plat prior to a big real estate auction conducted by Rome’s 100-year-old J.L. Todd Auction Co.
Todd and T. Lynn Davis were the premiere auctioneers in Georgia. Hammond said that many of the auction companies across Georgia could trace their roots to either Todd or Davis.
“Back in those days, salesmen pretty much lived out of their cars,” Coker said. Todd was able to rapidly build a reputation as a straightforward auctioneer who would outwork anyone to get the best deal for his clients and the business grew rapidly and expanded
all over the nation. “I think it was his networking with Realtors that had an auction need and they would call Mr. Todd,” Land said.
Coker said the company had 10-12 salesmen who traveled all over the country. “I think they lived out of their cars,” Coker said. “If anybody considered an auction his name would come up. At one time he had as many sales west of the Mississippi as he had east of it.”
The list of clients have included famed evangelist
Billy Graham, Billy Carter, through an IRAordered sale — even Col. Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. “We sold the original restaurant Sanders owned in Kentucky,” Hammond said. Hammond claims the money from that sale was how he Sanders raised capital to start into franchising the KFC business.
Hammond said Col. Sanders tried to get Todd to take stock in the new company rather than take a commission on the Doug Walker / Rome News-Tribune
sale, but Todd said he’d just take his money and go back to Georgia.
The company sold the former Atlanta Crackers stadium in Atlanta and Rickwood Field, another historic baseball park in Birmingham.
Hammond also recalled a big sale of a buffalo ranch off Interstate 81 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1983. “We had about 500 people there,” Hammond said. “We just sold so many of them and then you went out there and you caught them and you loaded them up. We didn’t mess with them.”
Hammond has a family history with Todd Auction. His father Raymond started with Todd back in the mid-1950s.
Land said that Todd loved the Wall Street Journal and was a frequent advertiser in the national publication. That led to business over the place and resulted in frequent repeat business over the decades.
Hammond said that most of the big auctions nowadays are estate sales and very few are absolute auctions. An absolute auction means that items will sell for whatever the high bid is, nothing is held in reserve. Nobody wants to do absolutes because they want to know what you’re going to get for it,” Hammond said.
Land said another problem with an absolute auction is that the auctioneer has got to be sure that he’s going to get more than what may be owed on the property or item.
“My experience is that absolute brings more people because they know it’s going to sell.” Land said. “They’re not wasting their time,” Hammond said.
J.L. Todd Auction still holds to the old 10 percent buyers premium method of selling property instead of negotiating a set price for conducting the sale. “Most everybody just accepts it,” Land said. If the successful bid for an item is $100,000, an extra $10,000 is added that goes to the auction company.