Meares Auction Group, one of our long-standing top ranked houses, has lowered its buyer’s premium to 5% for its Oct. 24 auction featuring more than 400 lots of key date coins, commemoratives, silver, type sets and more.

We have noticed this downward trend with auctioneers trying to spur online competition by making calculations for buyers’ premiums easy to figure and 10% or lower, as well as ZERO by Southwest Bullion and Liberty Shops Auctions.

“The October 24th coin auction contains coins from two collectors – one is an estate out of Georgia where the consignor decided to sell the collection instead of keeping it at his home,” says auctioneer Darron Meares. “The estate coins consist of many lots of silver, over 20 commemoratives, multiple lots of Morgan and Peace dollars, GSA Horde CC Morgans and many more. Right now we are over 425 lots!”

Meares says the reason for lowering the buyer’s premium “is to help alleviate some of the ‘calculations’ buyers have to conduct before deciding how much to pay for coins in our auction. We are reducing down to the 5% range as this covers the amount we have to pay Proxibid to run the auction on their servers.

Meares adds, “By personally handling the coin inventory and uploading of items, I have reduced the impact on our company where we do not have to rely on the buyer’s premium to cover expenses as we once did. Many auction companies use buyer’s premium as a revenue source; we have always used it to offset costs to our sellers.”

That’s why Meares Auction Group has been in our top rankings.