An Auctioneer

What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath

In this episode of 'What It's Like To Be...', Dan Heath sits down with Joe Bodnar, an auctioneer from New Jersey who runs Bodner's Auction. Joe shares his journey from being a teenage runner for an auction house to becoming

Key takeaways

• Sentimental items often have little market value, while overlooked historical artifacts can be unexpectedly valuable.
• Auctioneers rely on instinct, pattern recognition, and decades of hands-on experience to assess worth.

Main topics

• The art of appraising personal property
• Psychology of auction bidding and urgency

Notable quotes

"What you think is junk is what's worth money, and everything you think is worth money, that's the junk."

Conclusion

Being an auctioneer is less about selling items and more about uncovering stories, recognizing value where

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Joe Bodner was a runner for an auctioneer when he was 17. A runner carries merchandise, delivers it, helps with the auction, that sort of thing. But he wasn't calling bids at that point. He needed to learn the skill first. So he practiced. I was like mimicking him going, you know, I do in Speaker 3 (0:20) my 20, get about 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. And he goes, you know what? You want to be an auctioneer? Let me teach you. Speaker 2 (0:27) The first thing Joe needed to learn was to count numbers forwards and backwards by fives, then by twenty-fives. You know, run it like 5, 10, 15, 20, Speaker 3 (0:37) 25, 30, all the way up to 100, and then go backwards, 100, 95, 90, 85, 80, 75, 70, 65, 60. Going backwards is where it's going to get tricky. You think it's easy until Speaker 2 (0:44) you start doing it backwards. So that's what he did. He put in the reps. Wherever he was, he'd run numbers. Another Speaker 3 (0:52) thing we used to do was a lot of tongue twisters. So I would do things like... Betty Bodner bought some butter, but she said this butter bitter. If I put it in my batter, it would make my batter bitter. But if I buy a bit of better butter, put it in my bitter batter, it would make my bitter batter better. So this bitty, bitty, bada, bada, bitty, bada, butter, put it in my bitter, better, better, better. Speaker 2 (1:09) This is maybe the best thing I've ever heard on this show. That was amazing. Today, Joe runs his own auction company, Bodner's Auction, based in New Jersey. He auctions antiques, collectibles, personal property. It used to be in person. Now he auctions stuff online. You know, when somebody goes through some Speaker 3 (1:30) kind of change, whether that's through a divorce, that's through death, and you have to sell your stuff, that's usually when you see me come in, roll in, and work hand in hand in helping you get rid of your stuff. Speaker 2 (1:42) It's a job that sparks a range of emotions. Speaker 3 (1:45) Every sale, before an auction, I'm nervous. It's that adrenaline rush of going up there and getting the most I can for you. And when a sale's hot, it's the greatest feeling in the world, and you're in euphoria, and the whole business is great. And then when you have a bad sale and prices are terrible and they beat you up, you just want to go off yourself, and it's like, what the hell just happened? That was the worst day of my life. Speaker 2 (2:22) I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. A seismologist, a homicide detective, a baseball player. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Joe Bodnar what it's like to be an auctioneer. We'll talk about how he distinguishes treasure from junk. The tricks to get people bidding emotionally. and what was the biggest score of his whole career? Stay with us. Speaker 4 (3:03) I just feel like we are surrounded in this world by bullshit. So how can you know what's real and what's not? Science Versus. That's how. We answer questions like, does anti-aging skincare actually work? And what is your true personality type? And to answer these questions, we don't use opinions. We dive into the scientific studies, talk to the experts, and put it in a podcast that I know you are going to love. Listen to Science Versus on Spotify. Speaker 2 (3:34) Before Joe decides whether to work with a new client, he's got to figure out whether what they have is worth auctioning or not, which is an art unto itself. Speaker 3 (3:44) What I love to always say to people is, hey, what you think is junk is what's worth money, and everything you think is worth money, that's the junk. That's usually how it works. Speaker 2 (3:52) Oh, tell me about that. Like, tell me about those two sides of things. Like, what do people think is going to be valuable that actually turns out not to be? Oh, Speaker 3 (3:59) it's always something that a family member really cherished or something. And they always probably told their child, hey, when I die, this is worth a lot of money. Don't give it away. Or, you know, and the reality is a lot of that most of the time has more sentimental value versus an actual real value in the marketplace. Give me some specific examples if some come to mind. Yeah, no, one great story. There was an estate where he was selling his mom's personal property. Okay. And she basically had tons and tons of jewelry, yard rows, silver, fine antiques. She had really beautiful stuff. But when I came for day two, they had a pile of boxes out at the street for garbage pickup. And me, I look at everything. I'm like a hoarder myself and a treasure hunter. And I open up these boxes and what he has on the street is a bunch of photographs. And it's a ton, a ton of photographs of NASA, satellites, spaceships, and things like that. And I'm like, wow, this is great. And I pull them out and I put them on the truck. I go in, I said, what's the deal with these boxes? He goes, that's garbage. We didn't know what to do with it. His father worked for RCA. And he was one of the scientists that worked on creating satellites for weather, weather satellites. And basically, I had 5,000 photographs of the history of RCA creating the weather satellites and spaceships and space shuttles and just unique stuff. It was all great. It was just really cool. So I go, well, listen. I'm going to take it and I'm going to sell it for you. And he's like, I was just throwing it. I said, no, I'm going to sell it for you. So we take it. We sorted it. I made a group by lots of like 20, 30 photographs at a time. And that part of the collection ended up bringing about $18,000 plus just for the photographs. Speaker 2 (5:51) Whoa. Speaker 3 (5:52) And they were just going to throw it in the dumpster. They were going to throw it in the dumpster. They dismissed it as, hey, this is just junk from where my father worked. And they were more concerned about like. the collectibles that were in the curio cabinet. That was like, hey, this is where the treasure was. But I was like, no, the treasure, that was actually more of a treasure than some of the collectibles they had, you know? Speaker 2 (6:12) So what are some of those things that they think are like super valuable and you're like, unfortunately, no. Precious moments. What is that? Speaker 3 (6:23) Precious Moments are like a collectible that is sold at Hallmark that was really kind of collected through the 80s and the 90s. And they even still sell them today. Oh, I think there's Speaker 2 (6:32) like real syrupy figurines. Is that? Yeah, Speaker 3 (6:35) they're like a clear glaze figurine, generally of a young child or a young boy and girl. But Precious Moments are one thing that everybody thinks. Beanie Babies, another prime example. Oh, those are valuable. They are not valuable. Not at all. You can think they're valuable. You can go online and look on eBay. Speaker 2 (6:52) You Speaker 3 (6:52) look at completed auctions and you might see one that sold for a half a million dollars or $20,000 and they claim it's really rare. It is not selling. I don't care what you say. It's Speaker 2 (7:02) a Speaker 3 (7:02) bunch of baloney. Man, Speaker 2 (7:03) that is so interesting. So how, like you have such an encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff. Do you just kind of build it up one piece at a time or are there certain like themes where even if you've never directly encountered something, you kind of. have a vibe of whether it's valuable or not. Speaker 3 (7:18) Oh, no, absolutely. No, I definitely have a vibe. I mean, I started working for an auction when I was 17, and I just fell in love with the business. And really, before I opened my own place at 20, I was working six, seven different auction houses every month throughout the state of New Jersey by the time I was 17 through 20. So I really had a hands-on and a feeling and looking at it. And yes, When you do it long enough, you have an intuition or you can look at something and it reeks of quality or it reeks of something that is rare and worth money. That's why I always tell people, photograph the entire room and let me look at the rooms because what I am seizing that now is. I just know by what you collect, the kind of person you were, the personality you have and the, what kind of stuff you had, you know, like, you know, the person who collects yard rows and Hummel's and dinnerware and some silver while their mom definitely had jewelry in the house and everything else, you know, you, you, I really can fine tune and understand the psyche of somebody's collection and what's in their house and understand. probably what's there, what you're not showing me, just by looking at some photos of a living room, dining room, and a bedroom. Speaker 2 (8:30) I mean, isn't it tempting, like in this satellite photo situation? I mean, they're throwing it out. Aren't you tempted to say, hey, I'll take these off your hands? You know, is that kosher or Speaker 3 (8:39) no? No, I wouldn't do it. It's not kosher because, I mean, the reality for me, and this is what I love doing, and I've learned through the years, I work on commission. I'm commission basis. So basically, I am working with you to get the most I possibly can for it. So by doing that, it's not like an antique dealer who's trying to buy it as cheap as possible and sell it as much as possible. So there is a conundrum if you're like an antique dealer buying stuff, but you're also auctioning and