No honest comparable

There is nothing else like it. That is the whole problem.

Every method of pricing property assumes something else recently sold that resembles it. When nothing did, every method quietly becomes an opinion — including the confident ones.

A 400-acre row-crop farm with two miles of river frontage. A house an architect built for himself. A commercial building whose value depends entirely on who is standing in it. These are one-of-one assets, and the appraisal process was not designed for them — it was designed for subdivisions.

What you get instead is a number with a wide confidence interval and a straight face over it. Price it high and it sits, collecting days on market. Price it low and you will never know what you left behind, because a fast sale looks the same either way.

An open room is the only honest appraisal.

If there is no comparable, the value of the asset is simply whatever the most motivated qualified buyer will pay — and there is exactly one way to find that out, which is to put them in a room together on a known date and ask.

Everything before the sale is engineering: working out who those buyers are, how many of them exist, where they are, and what it takes to get them registered. That is the part that decides the outcome. The auction itself is the last twenty minutes.

When the pool is too thin.

Singularity cuts both ways. An asset so unusual that only one or two buyers on earth want it does not produce competition, and an auction without competition is just a deadline. In that case the work is finding and courting those two buyers directly, patiently, which is a different job.

We would rather tell you that at the start than discover it on the day.

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