Taking a room auction online without losing the room.

2013

The house decided its international audience should be able to take part without travelling. But a room auction is a performance, and the value of the business rested on it being a good one. If going online meant a worse experience for the people in the room, or a second-class one for those watching, the move was not worth making.

They needed a partner who understood how a room auction actually works, not only how to stream video.

What we had, and what we did not

By 2013 we had covered the entire auction lifecycle for over a decade — consignment, cataloguing, pre-bidding, settlement — with one exception. We had not built live auctions.

What we did have was detailed knowledge of how room auctions run, from years of working with auctioneers. That turned out to be the harder half of the problem.

The design constraint

Remote bidders and in-room bidders had to be on genuinely equal footing. That sounds like a fairness principle; it is really an engineering specification. It means resolving simultaneous and identical bids deterministically. It means the auctioneer needs controls to correct a bid, pause, and move between lots without the online audience losing the thread. It means the room's pace has to survive the latency of a video stream.

What information appears on screen during the live sale was decided together with the auctioneers, not designed by us in isolation. We also built the process for bidders participating by telephone, because that audience did not disappear.

What happened

Lots per auction grew from a few hundred to several thousand. The scope, reach and reputation of the house grew with it. Today it is one of the leading auction houses in the Netherlands, with genuine international reach.

The credit belongs to generations of expertise in auctioning. What the software did was remove the ceiling.