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Gods of the Hammer — Naomi Manuell

Naomi Manuell September 29

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Last week, a professional real estate auctioneer named Mark Sumich travelled from Auckland to Melbourne to compete in the NAB Australasian Real Estate Institutes’ Auctioneering Championships. Sumich, with his silver hair and open, dazzling smile, resembles a mid-career Burt Bacharach and has the effortless charm of a man at the very top of his game. Public real estate auctions are more than just machines to determine the price of a house. They’ve become complex cultural events where street theatre and game theory collide and every human weakness, from avarice to vanity, is enacted. There are times when nothing seems more important in Australia than owning a patch of it.

Mark Sumich has won this event twice before, in 2007 and 2008. The day before heats commence, he gives an auction master class in which he reminds his audience of novice and senior auctioneers that what they do is significant beyond the material rewards, though these are not insubstantial. He recalls being at a funeral recently and listening to a eulogy in which properties bought and sold over a lifetime were enumerated. Extrapolating, one might see the auctioneer in existential terms, somewhere between midwife and undertaker. So as well as being entertaining (‘because you’ve only got them for ten minutes’), Mark Sumich says it’s an auctioneer’s duty to be accurate. For someone at an auction, it’s a life-defining moment and in particular, there can be no mistakes when taking bids. ‘You have to own the numbers…If you can’t count, then don’t be an auctioneer’, he says, though it’s not until the following day as competitors fall beneath the barrage of rapid fire bids that this can be fully appreciated. One competitor, a dapper young man with floppy hair and a pocket square, carries an auctioneer’s hammer. It’s an archaic tool, a totem perhaps, but it’s not armour. ‘I’m dying up here!’ he moans as bids fly about him like so much shrapnel.

The Real Estate Institute of Victoria hosts the Championships in one of those large, thick-carpeted hotel function rooms where it’s always night. Sixteen auctioneers compete in the heats and eleven are eliminated, leaving five in the final. Auctions must be completed within fifteen minutes and are judged in a range of categories including presentation, delivery and bidding. Each auction features the same property and the same group of bidders working from a script that directs the pattern of bidding as well as questions and interjections meant to interrupt the auctioneer’s flow and test their understanding of the contract of sale and relevant laws. The script for the final includes a bidder slipping away when police arrive (only to sneak back and continue bidding once they leave), a phone bidder with patchy mobile reception wasting time and a couple of legal red herrings. It’s a bit like improv, but with numbers.

Language is often the victim. One finals competitor hides his nerves behind clunky formality: ‘It’s a privilege to facilitate proceedings here for you today’. Another describes the home’s location as ‘bathed in public transport’, as unlovely and baffling a phrase as could ever be uttered. The slicker competitors keep things light and frothy, framing their spiels within familiar narratives. There’s the quest: ‘For one of you here today, the search is finally over!’ There’s the treasure hunt: the finalist leaping out at his audience to ask, ‘Are you feeling lucky?’ One auctioneer’s ‘happy family’ story evokes squeals of delight as the successful bidder’s children race up the corridor choosing their bedrooms. Then there’s status story in which the new owner’s friends are made horribly jealous by a state-of-the-art designer kitchen.

Mark Sumich is the last contestant of the day. His narrative is a love story. A young Belgian marathon runner comes to Melbourne to compete in the 1956 Olympics. During the race, he passes a house and inexplicably pauses to admire it. He feels he belongs to the house, but doesn’t know why. Fifty five years later, the same house is auctioned… As fanciful as the story is, the house is now an object of desire. Sumich sizes up the crowd, grinning. He’s letting them in on the joke and they’re all laughing at the silliness of the real estate hard-sell but coming along for the ride anyway. But when the bidding starts, the focus shifts from the house, ‘perched on a prolific fifth of an acre’, to its suitors, the bidders. How deep, the auctioneer demands to know, is their love? His voice becomes louder and deeper and as the pace quickens the crowd closes in. They’ve heard the script four times already today, but still they’re transfixed. The room is nothing more now than the sound of numbers. They take flight, fluttering higher and higher, the crowd witnessing their ascension as if they’ve never seen anything like it before. But when the auctioneer finally pauses and peers sternly out at them, they remember there’s no more left to come. All that remains is a monstrous silence and the auctioneer, waiting without moving. Finally, he raises his arm to strike. Going once! Twice! Three times! Sold! After the applause, the crowd disperses, leaving the judges to tally the scores. Later that evening at the gala dinner it comes as a surprise to no-one when Mark Sumich is presented with his third Championship trophy.

Photograph from Tsai Law Company


 

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by Jane Usher
30 Sep 11 at 1:50

What a beautifully written piece. I wanted more!

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