A POSTAL AUCTION WITH NO BUYER’S PREMIUM, NO EXTRA VAT OR HIDDEN EXTRAS AND GUARANTEED
Dear Colleague,
Don’t ask me how, I’m not sure we’ll specifically remember – but each day over the past 3 months we’ve been carefully monitoring auction describing input in an attempt to ensure that we celebrate our 60th Anniversary Universal Philatelic Auction in some degree of style … and such was the level of intense ‘focus’ that we’ve actually ‘overshot’ the seemingly impossible target of our first (and perhaps only) £2,000,000 auction by an incredible £83,171 and the 25,000 lot target by some 3,350 lots more … to an amazing 28,350 lot auction …
Naturally, a 28,350 lot auction pushes its own ‘bow-wave’ of problems before it. Remember we discussed the physical limitations of our auction catalogue? As many of you know – just to print a production of this market- leading quality and physically distribute it to 6,250 different collector colleagues such as yourself globally costs some £50,000 each auction. Additionally an increasingly high percentage of colleagues take their U P A catalogue on-line so that a further 1,500 of you help us to save planet and auction resource by viewing their catalogues ‘virtually’ on-line … for which please accept my sincere gratitude.
So to save on run-away cost (if this catalogue weighs a few grams more – just to mail it to you all would cost some £10,000 more) … sadly, for the 1st time – we’ve been forced to ‘precis’ the final ALL-NEW 5,380 different additional lots. Commencing Page 242 you’ll observe tight column listings of lot number and estimate all ‘sub-headed’ by Country. Of course for the 6 ‘on-line’ collectors out of every 10 of our colleagues you will find every lot fully itemised and described on-line where in this ‘brave new world’ physical constraint barely exists … BUT ‘WHAT-IF you are one of the conventional ‘old-school’ eschewing the 21st Century ‘trappings’ of the ‘face-book’ world (and I can hardly blame you) … how may we prevent you from being ‘disadvantaged’ by the power of the internet? The answer is simple. Just tell us which country / areas / subjects you have an interest in and we’ll print off and mail/airmail you the appropriate catalogue pages … free of charge, but for reasonable requests only.
May I make a suggestion? If you’re not over-whelmed by the earlier content of this catalogue - don’t ignore these 5,380 lots commencing page
View our auction online, bid by e-mail
www.upastampauctions.co.uk
UNIVERSAL PHILATELIC AUCTIONS (Admin Office), 4 THE OLD COALYARD, WEST END, NORTHLEACH, GLOS, GL54 3HE, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1451 861111 Fax: +44 (0) 1451 861297 e-mail:
bids@upastampauctions.co.uk
Confidence:
WHAT DIFFERENTIATES UPA FROM OTHER POSTAL AUCTIONS? As far as bidding is concerned there are NO differences from accepted practice of the best of other postal auctions. You can bid with total confidence NOW without reading on or making use of the following collector-friendly features.
Value: Transparency:
UPA UNIQUE FEATURES: SETTING NEW STANDARDS FOR THE 21st CENTURY 1. The most IMPORTANT advantage is that by keeping the catalogues you will discover exactly what each stamp is really worth.
HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS 2. For reasons best known to themselves (probably to disguise what isn’t selling), most postal auctions don’t print previous sale price realisations in their next catalogues. UPA WILL PRINT ACTUAL PRICES REALISED FOR SALE, #1 IN #2, ETC. In this way you discover NOT ONLY what individual sets and singles really sell for (regardless of catalogue value) BUT ALSO...
Enhanced Value:
UPA REDUCING ESTIMATES SYSTEM 3. IF AN ITEM DOES NOT SELL IN SALE #1 WE WILL RE-OFFER IT IN SALE #2 AND REDUCE THE ESTIMATE BY 10% – ad infinitum! – so that after 5 sales a less than HALF PRICE BID may succeed, and because reserves are 80% of estimates you could buy at just 46% of estimate and a mere fraction of catalogue price.
Unique Bargains: HERE IS HOW IT WORKS BUT HOW LONG EXAMPLE: £100 lot (reserve £80), unsold once new estimate £90 (reserve £72) DARE YOU WAIT!
twice unsold new estimate £80 (reserve £64); three times unsold estimate £72 (reserve £58), four times unsold estimate £65 (reserve £52); five times unsold estimate £58 (reserve £46).
a Bid of £46 at 80% reserve – if no other bids – SUCCEEDS ! (N.B. estimates may be reduced by larger than 10% increments after several times unsold.)
After some 8 to 10 times unsold you could probably BID ZERO AND HAVE A VERY GOOD CHANCE OF BUYING IT FOR NOTHING! Of course the risk is that the longer you hold out for an item you want some other collector may step in and buy it before you! After all we do want to stay in business.
BUT HOW DO I KEEP TRACK OF AN UNSOLD? 4. That’s EASY – because we will IDENTIFY an unsold for you in the description from the second time it’s offered – the description will say US for UNSOLD, US2 for twice unsold, etc. The estimate will be automatically reduced each time. 5. YOUR CATALOGUE WILL BUILD INTO AN ESSENTIAL REAL PRICE GUIDE – keep it and build a small expandable database of what stamps are REALLY WORTH. Information is king!
242. We’ve taken this chance to include far more unusual specialist material, varieties, postmarks, basic stamps too, but also including covers: I will be fascinated to see what percentage of these ‘abbreviated’ lots sells first time …
Now, I’m going to let you into a little secret and it is prompted by an increasingly common phenomena that one hardly ever saw – back in the ‘good old pre 2000 days’. We see / handle a lot of stamp collections. More than most … and an increasing proportion of collectors have started to cut out photos of stamps depicted in this catalogue and insert them either to illustrate a point OR in place of rare stamps that may be outwith their budget. When valuing stamps the prevalence of photos rather than the real stamps – can be most off-putting as it interrupts the valuers mental process. But I hardly ever saw this pre the millennium …
… to explain: a lot of stamp auction catalogues from all over the world cross my desk. It is amazing to me how few of them take care or can even be bothered to illustrate properly the stamps that they wish you to bid upon. To me this is almost the most important part of our catalogue – illustrating in glorious ‘technicolour’ the most desirable stamps so that even if you may never own them you have the joy of looking. Well, for the past 15 years we’ve been colour-correcting the scans of every stamp … and for the past 5 years with powerful colour correction so that we can edit in ‘daylight’ colours even when it is dark in winter at 4 pm. We’ve never had a stamp returned on the basis of printed colour but we’ve had hundreds of comments to say how wonderful the images are and how representative of the finally won stamp. We’ve also heard from others how careful they have to be bidding in other auctions offering fuzzy low-quality images.
With 1,943 bidders we didn’t quite break our 2,000 different bidders in
U P A #59 which was one of our most successful auctions … I’m hoping that to celebrate 15 years of quarterly U P A auctions offering you crucially more than 1 million NO BUYER’S PREMIUM lots … 28,350 buyer’s premium free lots in U P A #60 will entice you to participate this time.
The Team, my wife and I, hope you will enjoy participating as much as we have enjoyed creating it. Happy Hunting to a brighter philatelic future.
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