For Duby, it was a revelation.
“I don’t know what possessed me,” Duby tells me.
“I was just sort of trying to see, is there a better way to do this?”
The nagging uncertainty isn’t limited to buyers.
Even in a hot market, a seller may leave the closing table unfulfilled.
Did their request for"highest and best" offersactuallyyield the highest and best?
It’s hard to say.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In Australia, about a third of homes sell via auctions that wrap up in a matter of minutes.
Despite all that, the idea of open auctions is more tantalizing than ever.
They face an uphill battle.
“I don’t see why we don’t do that,” Duby tells me.
“I don’t see how that doesn’t help.”
But he’s here to sell real estate, not religion.
“Not me the house!”
With that, the auction begins.
In the end, it sells for more than 1.5 million Australian dollars, or about $980,000.
The whole thing takes less than half an hour.
Every now and then a video like this will go viral among Americans who balk at the ritual.
Auctions are risky, to be sure.
It’s hard to imagine regular homes in the US trading hands this way.
Final Offer, in Massachusetts, is one online marketplace that mediates auction-ish sales.
Other buyers soon entered the picture: Buyer 2 bid $661,500.
Buyer 1 responded by going $3,000 higher.
At the eleventh hour, Buyer 6 emerged with a bid of $810,573.
The entire saga is available for anyone to see on Final Offer’s website.
In real estate, it turns out, a little transparency goes a long way.
But Quirk tells me more than 80% of sellers choose to make the bids public.
Neither Quirk nor Mike Russo, the founder of SparkOffer, thinks of his platform as an auction exactly.
For one, home sales aren’t just about price.
They might request an inspection and ask the seller to make repairs if something comes up.
Bottom line, not all buyers are equal in the eyes of a seller.
Most important, new marketplaces would have to convince American sellers and their agents to turn away from tradition.
That kind of cultural shift is a tall order.
But it’s unclear who really benefits from the system we have.
Buyers rarely get feedback that could help them make stronger offers in the future.
Australia isn’t a perfect analog for the US.
And while most sellers are represented by agents,most buyers are not.
But still, hardly anyone is proposing we copy and paste this Australian tradition.
The country’s real-estate market does tell us, however, that another way is possible.
American consumers may not be ready for auctions yet, Hahn told me.
“But it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen at some point.”
James Rodriguezis a senior reporter on Business Insider’s Discourse team.
