I've been in this business for a couple of decades, attended hundreds of auctions... and can tell you that Moecker is the most despicable auction group I've ever dealt with.
Florida has been a strange place for me for auctions over the years. Two of the best auctions I've ever been to were in Florida....but so have some of the worst. The absolute worst is described below in a post from years ago.
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Auction from Hell (Summer 2004, Moecker Auction in Florida, High end CNC woodworking shop)
On Wednesday in Tampa, FL had an auction happen of such assholity I was amazed. Stay with me here cause my following sentence isn't quite it. They offered a bulk bid of the whole place, to be compared with the total of each item individually and if the individual items totaled within 5 percent less than the bulk bid, then the auction would stand and everyone got their items.
Well, this was only slightly irritating, as this is done sometimes and only once have I ever seen the bulk bidder to bid high enough that the individual bids didn't go much higher such that it became a moot point.
Me and one other older fellow were the only bidders for the whole place (don't be impressed...small shop ). I dropped out and his final bid was way lower than the total would likely be ($31,000 just to give a sense of it)
So anyway, the auction progresses in 100 degree heat, as they had no electricity for the wall fans and it was the middle of summer in Tampa, Florida. The old man gets a few CNC machines, I get a few cool things, others get lots of treasures.
About half way thru the auctioneer announces the *bulk bidder has decided to up his bid to $45,000* Whaaaaa ?!!? You can't do that ! I say. To which auctioneer says oh yes we can, read section 2 of paragraph 8 of the bid contract we handed out. I say, but besides the fact that this is never done, this was *not advertised* that you can do this, so I drove 7 hours to find this out ? He then says bulk bidder "is a gentleman" and his agreed to not up his bid any more. I figure $45K still not likely to take it, so I settle down and we proceed.
Auction ends, total is $55,000 everyone gets ready to pay, auctioneer announces 'everyone leave the building' while they call the trustee to confirm price is enough. Whaaaaaa ?!1??
After some wait, see folks 'paying' so I figure all is ok. But when I go to pay I'm informed that the bulk bidder upped his bid to $58,000 and bought the whole place !!!!!
The folks I thought were paying were just getting their deposits back ! (yes, as if everything else wasn't stupid enough, the auctioneers were so assholic as to require a 25 percent cash deposit as the auction progressed and your totals increased)
There's actually much more to this story, some of it quite funny, but my finger tips are getting tired so I'll just end this segment by saying that it boggles my mind that any auctioneer would do something so underhanded as to allow the totals of all these folks standing around sweating all day, loosing work income, etc, to be outbid *at the end* of the auction, when the bulk bidder knows exactly what it takes to get the whole deal.