Auction has variety of items
SLIPPERY ROCK — Summer is known as prime time for yard sales, but even veteran yard sales consumers may not know it also is the season of the surplus sale.
And if you're into unusual items that can be had at buyer's market prices — tractors and sailboats and bows — you might want to take notice of colleges and universities around the time classes start shutting down.
Because that is when school officials start looking for ways to get rid of outdated, and sometimes unexpected items.
At 9 a.m. Saturday, Slippery Rock University will be auctioning off, among other things, sailboats, bows, microscopes and a variety of vehicles and furniture.
Don Braham, an Ohio auctioneer who has run SRU's surplus sales for nearly three decades, said the school's event can last three to five hours.
SRU's surplus auctions are public and mostly attract casual buyers, Braham said. University officials said SRU employees are barred from taking part in the bidding.
“We get a decent turnout,” he said. “It's not huge. Anywhere from 50 to 100 people show up.”
The sales always manage to keep Braham on his toes. He's sold everything from cars and guns to computers and kayaks for the university.
Twenty-some years ago, Braham recalls, an auction included a batch of single-shot, .22-caliber rifles and competition targets used by SRU's now-defunct shooting team.
“That probably wouldn't even be legal today,” he said.
This year the sale includes pallets of recurve bows and arrows, and seven 12-foot sailboats in addition to the usual collection of electronics, furniture and vehicles.
Lori Wolfe, a storekeeper at SRU's central receiving office, said the unusual items remind her of the year when SRU's auction featured a pontoon boat used by the school's recreation department at Moraine State Park.“You just never know,” what ends up for sale, said Wolfe. “You can have all kinds of weird stuff.”The school's receiving warehouse is home throughout the year to unwanted or outdated items from various departments, Wolfe said. Other SRU departments can snag the items if they see something they need. But after classes shut down for the summer, the focus becomes unloading the excess baggage.Wolfe and her crew will start setting up the auction items tonight in central receiving's parking lot.Then on Saturday, the university will welcome bidders to its live auction.“We don't make a lot of money on it,” Wolfe said, “But instead of throwing stuff in the landfills it's a way to get it out there to people who use it.”Wolfe said the auction usually nets $5,000 to $10,000 for SRU after Braham's fees are paid.Some institutions, like Grove City College, eschew the sales completely.Andrew Morgan, a facilities administrator at the college, said Grove City prefers instead to donate outdated items like furniture to charities and nonprofit organizations.Others, like Butler County Community College, are taking advantage of technology to change the way unwanted surplus items are sold.Dottie Los, who has managed the college's surplus sales for a decade, said that for years the college ran its events “like a garage sale.”But unlike at SRU, the items were only available to BC3 employees and bids were taken in writing from interested buyers, sorted, and awarded based on the highest offer.However, this year that all changed when Los began using a government website to make the college's surplus items available nationwide.Los, who said the college has sold items to buyers as far away as Vermont, Georgia and Kentucky, sees the online outreach as a better way to market the deals.“The audience that we had (before) was very small. Things were going for $1, $5. I think the most we ever made from the biggest surplus sale we ever had was $300,” Los said.She said people might be surprised what's up for sale. Earlier this year a collection of library slides on American and European history sparked a bit of a bidding war before going to a buyer from Georgia.“It's very interesting the items people will buy, and for how much,” Los said.
