Leu Web Auction 28 - 9/14 Dec: some of my coins from my Collection are offered

[Prieure de Sion]

I have a few other collector friends who also sent Leu the PDF document. I'm curious whether the form was sent to the other buyers from Germany.

With Roma, CNG, Heritage, Noonans etc - it always works for all of them. But it must also be said that the PDF from Leu was attached to the last previous Leu auction. But maybe this time 7,000 coins were too many and too chaotic that it was forgotten. Still very annoying.

 

52 minutes ago, Limes said:

Is there the possibility to ask your postal service the tax fee that you paid unnecessarily to be paid back to you? 

Yes... no 😉 

Yes, you can complain and I will do so, but...

It's not that easy. Because you cannot complain to the post office, you have to complain directly to German customs.

 

1. The first thing I have to do is write to Deutsche Post, which will send me the customs documents. These customs documents are not sent along and must be requested separately from the German postal service. It can take 2-3 weeks for me to receive these documents from Deutsche Post.

2. Then I have to send an objection letter to German Customs with the reasons - and the papers that I received from Deutsche Post (point 1).

And here is the first hurdle, if I don't do this at German customs within 30 days, the deadline is over. And since Deutsche Post sometimes takes 3-4 weeks to send the customs documents to me, there is a high chance that I will exceed the deadline.

3. If I do it within the deadline, it is not guaranteed that a subsequent objection will be accepted and accepted. The German state doesn't like paying back taxes. It is not guaranteed that it will work.

And if it works, see German forum, then it can take 6 months or almost a year until the objection is processed and the taxes are repaid. There are also buyers who gave up after a year.

 

Of course I will try to appeal, I'm not giving away 110 euros. But it's just very annoying, it's costing me a lot of time and will cost me nerves. And if things go badly, I receive the documents from the post office too late for an objection, then it's over.

I gave Leu the feedback because of the auction. They haven't responded to my criticism and simply ignored my email. I'm curious to see if they respond to my email because of the shippment and tax today.

 

 

Edited January 20 by Prieure de Sion

[Deinomenid]

And  to make it all the worse, they've just jacked  up their  prices by 10% again.

No explanation why- guess that's  just how  cartels sorry oligopolies sorry the free market work.

 

"At the start of the new year, we would like to give you a brief overview of the next Leu dates, events, and news.

New Buyer’s premium
(see terms and conditions)
Starting with Web Auction 29 and Auction 15, we are introducing a new buyer’s premium of 20% instead of 18.5% for web auctions, and 22.5% instead of 20% for floor auctions."

[DonnaML]

1 hour ago, Deinomenid said:

And  to make it all the worse, they've just jacked  up their  prices by 10% again.

No explanation why- guess that's  just how  cartels sorry oligopolies sorry the free market work.

 

"At the start of the new year, we would like to give you a brief overview of the next Leu dates, events, and news.

New Buyer’s premium
(see terms and conditions)
Starting with Web Auction 29 and Auction 15, we are introducing a new buyer’s premium of 20% instead of 18.5% for web auctions, and 22.5% instead of 20% for floor auctions."

CNG is up to something like 24% already, isn't it?

[Deinomenid]

22% on my last invoice, but it's all a gradual march upwards. 100% might be a reasonable  point to pause at.

I almost admire how they announce it as  "news" with  no pretense it is  because of rising costs.

[Rand]

Why does the rise happen? Is there a lack of competition? Or is there a parallel reduction in seller fees?

With sales moving online and no need for published catalogues, as some companies do, cheaper photo technologies, and better processing software, shall we expect lower overheads? 

I envy old collectors with 10% buyer fees in old catalogues. I'm not sure what seller fees were like, and not all coins had photos, though.

[Hesiod]

31 minutes ago, Rand said:

Is there a lack of competition?

I think in this case it's because their competition raised their fees already

[Curtis JJ]

1 hour ago, DonnaML said:

CNG is up to something like 24% already, isn't it?

1 hour ago, Deinomenid said:

22% on my last invoice,

CNG's last increase (of 2-2.5%) was August 2022.

The fees can be really confusing, though, because they vary by type of auction AND method of placing bids. For at least the past four years they have had 3 possible bidder fees at any given moment. 

CNG's current fees (August 2022 - present):

• 20% for e-Auctions;
• 22.5% for Feature Auctions when placed on CNG website;
• 25% for Feature Auctions when placed live or any other way.

Before Aug 2022 (since at least late 2019):

• 18% for e-Auctions; 
• 20% for Feature Auctions when placed on CNG website;
• 22.5% for Feature Auctions when placed live or any other way.

Put differently:

The 20% e-Auction bidder fee was still current at the most recent e-Auction 553 (3 Jan 2024). That began with e-Auction 522 (24 Aug 2022). Before then, it had been 18% since at least 2019 (through e-Auction 521 [3 Aug 2022]).

The 22.5/25% (website/other) Feature Auction bidder fees have applied to all recent "Floor auctions" with print catalogs, most recently Triton XXVII (Jan 2024). Those fees have been the same since Keystone 8 (23 Aug 2022). Before August 2022, CNG's Feature Auction bidder fees were 20%/22.5% (website/other) since at least 2019.

Edited January 22 by Curtis JJ

[Furryfrog02]

[SimonW]

There are two reasons for the ever-increasing buyer's commissions:

1) The fierce competition among auction houses for consignors has led to lower and lower seller's commissions. In some cases, they are now negative, meaning that the seller also receives a share of the buyer's commission.

2) Some buyers include the buyer's commission in their bidding calculations and therefore do not pay more when the buyer's commission increases. However, some buyers do not and pay more than they would if the buyer's commission were lower. As a result, an auction house that charges a lower buyer's commission than all the others puts itself in a worse position.

The buyer's commission will therefore continue to rise until it is so high that it negatively affects the final price. Premiums of 30% and more are not uncommon at art auctions today.

[Furryfrog02]

After winning a coin from a European auction house and paying a reasonable (?) 18%, I decided that auctions like that are not for me. I don't like paying that much for essentially no reason. 

[Deinomenid]

5 hours ago, SimonW said:

The buyer's commission will therefore continue to rise until it is so high that it negatively affects the final price.

This is not wholly*** knowable. Were  it to be, all the surrounding factors would need to be constant. At best,  it's a informed feel, but even then it is only valid if the *seller* realizes  it affects the final price as an auction  house of  itself may accept or even should seek the trade off between price and margin.

Even assuming it were in some way knowable there are enough examples of where coin prices have fallen for sometimes sustained periods without triggering auction house rake (and I choose the word carefully!) reductions to suggest "nonmarket factors" are at play. And of course  it is easy to pin these on - say - fashions  changing, the money supply, hoard finds,  Iron Curtains falling, eccentric sheiks dying etc rather than a specific correlation with rake.

None of  this is in any way a complaint or even a generalized rant. My comment was only to highlight the nature of the Leu price rise "news" especially after such a terrible experience for  one of   us at their hands.

Auctions  are very crude  approximations of  free markets and I and many others can  chose to buy/sell in them, bypass them entirely or even set up a new auction house if the returns are so attractive!

***There have been few decent academic studies of this, although the ones in the London wine market when for a while Christies and Sothebys operated very different models (no buyer comm vs 10%) are interesting as they give data on essentially the same  product at the same time with different fee structures, and there was one done on the Chicago wine market which  (I believe) showed rising auction costs fall almost wholly on the seller. As I recall, this was one of the main reasons it was very difficult to sue the major houses for monopolistic behaviour. Ie buyers did not suffer from  "price collusion".  Sellers suffer of course, if comm *net* prices rise, but we don't have the data  to  judge it, as we'd need to see what is really happening to sellers' percentage receipts of buyer comm too, and that is  hopelessly opaque. Funny, that!

[akeady]

You should just factor the buyer's premium into the price and there's no surprise.   Of course, it's easy to get carried away and to bid too much and this is the only way we can pay too much at auction.

The money the buyer pays goes to the consignor and to the auction house, so premiums ultimately come out of the consignor's pocket.

Rates have certainly been rising - CNG used to charge 10% buyer's premium in their esales - the oldest invoice I can find, from 2010, charged this rate.

Like Prieure's last complaint with Leu, my biggest gripe now is about being charged and overcharged VAT on things from outside the EU.   In Ireland, the correct antiquities rate is 13.5% (for items over 100 years old), but I usually am charged 23%, irrespective of whether the correct TARIC code is used or not.   I've never got any money back, but have also paid nothing sometimes (though rarely nowadays), so maybe it has evened out.   I buy less from outside the EU now - as bidding to allow for a 23% hit after premium means I don't win so often!

ATB,
Aidan.

Edited January 23 by akeady

[Curtis JJ]

23 hours ago, akeady said:

You should just factor the buyer's premium into the price and there's no surprise.   Of course, it's easy to get carried away and to bid too much and this is the only way we can pay too much at auction.

The money the buyer pays goes to the consignor and to the auction house, so premiums ultimately come out of the consignor's pocket.

Indeed. As a buyer, I've never had any problem with rising auction fees/buyer's premiums. Some vendors don't include a fee/buyer's premium at all. (E.g., Davissons or Berk, though the latter does Buy-Bid, and a few others.) It's not like that makes Davissons 20% cheaper. (I don't know for certain, but I assume they just explain how it works to the consignor, and correctly refer to the entire fee as a "consignor fee" -- which is what it actually is, whether they call half of it "buyer's fee" or not.)

I bid/pay one total price. So, it doesn't matter how much of the total is called "hammer" and how much fees ("buyer's" + "consignor's," the latter being secret).

Of course, it's nice if the consignor gets a big chunk, but we rarely learn what the consignor fee was, so we usually don't know what the total fees are.

I doubt it's true, but it's even empirically conceivable that fees (as a proportion of total price) have been declining even as the "buyer's fees" rise (i.e., if "consignor fees" are simultaneously dropping -- and sometimes even negative, as suggested in comments above).

Edited January 24 by Curtis JJ

[DonnaML]

52 minutes ago, Curtis JJ said:

Indeed. As a buyer, I've never had any problem with rising auction fees/buyer's premiums. Some vendors don't include a fee/buyer's premium at all. (E.g., Davissons or Berk, though the latter does Buy-Bid, and a few others.) It's not like that makes Davissons 20% cheaper. (I don't know for certain, but I assume they just explain how it works to the consignor, and correctly refer to the entire fee as a "consignor fee" -- which is what it actually is, whether they call half of it "buyer's fee" or not.)

I bid/pay one total price. So, it doesn't matter how much of the total is called "hammer" and how much fees ("buyer's" + "consignor's," the latter being secret).

Of course, it's nice if the consignor gets a big chunk, but we rarely learn what the consignor fee was, so we usually don't know what the total fees are.

I doubt it's true, but it's even empirically conceivable that fees (as a proportion of total price) have been declining even as the "buyer's fees" rise (i.e., if "consignor fees" are simultaneously dropping -- and sometimes even negative, as suggested in comments above).

When I sold my Vespasian aureus last September (the one with photographic pedigrees to 1908, 1910, and 1938), CNG charged me only a 5% buyer's fee, even though I was consigning only a single coin. Naturally, I was pleased.

[Deinomenid]

Maybe  it's not all a one way street, dear Leu et al. Just got this huge price  cut news from Sothebys. Slashing prices from a rather high base but still Sothebys is in a rather different league to Winterthur's finest, so it can't hurt...

 

As a Sotheby’s client (me?) , you deserve clarity and simplicity when buying and selling with us. So today, in response to consistent feedback, we’re announcing the most significant changes to our fee structures in more than 40 years.

First, we’ve reduced our buyer’s premium to a flat rate of 20% on purchases of a hammer value up to $6 million – and 10% on any amount above that. This represents a 26% decrease for the vast majority of our sales, and a reduction at all price points. And of course, whatever is good for buyers is good for sellers.

For sellers, we’ve standardized our commission rate to 10% up to $500,000 across all categories (i.e., a cap of $50,000 per lot).  Recognizing that our largest customers deserve preferred terms, we will waive our seller’s commission for consignments above $5 million, and will also rebate 40% of our buyer’s premium to sellers for consignments above $20 million.

And we’ve eliminated our Overhead Premium, which was previously a 1% administrative fee on all sales.