TCA loads of nice bikes and signs

[bikeworkshop]

There's probably a ~30% auctioneer's fee on top of the hammer price once you add everything up. Curly at £500 is still pretty good.
£6k sign, huh.

I'm 99% certain that anything to do with severely overpriced art, antiques, and collectables is money laundering. Best way to legalise some drug money, as a lot of these items are close to impossible to value, and take zero effort to produce or pick up at the tip.
Shops selling them have no chance of generating enough revenue to cover high street rent & rates, never mind make a living out of them. Most folks are currently living paycheck to paycheck, so there's no queues of customers forming out of the doors of art/antique shops either.

The antique market is also pretty dead with the exception of top-end stuff, according to a dealer i was talking to on Saturday.

Some top end bicycle stuff is still selling at high value, but a Curly Hetchins used to be in that category!

Given the sign was in Erse, Irish gaelic, the money to buy was probably helped by the republic's "generous" tax breaks for apple and other giant multinationals, contrary to EU rules.


That's not money laundering...
It's just super-low taxes for the extremely wealthy!

TCA have an upper cash purchase limit of £2000, so any dirty money would be to be laundered already.

buyer's commission looks like 24%
sellers is 14%

 

[M_Chavez]

so any dirty money would be to be laundered already.

It's not like they can be in cahoots with the money launderers or anything like that.

 

[bikeworkshop]

TCA is run by Peter Card - very decent man, incredibly knowledgeable about early vintage bike values - he used to be the auctioneer for Bonham.

Back In the days of the MTB boom, we would occasionally get a customer, heavily laden with gold chains, buying top-end kit for cash

Lovely manners, as a rule.
I don't think they ever went over £2000 though
That's quite a lot of tennners to stuff into the till.

 

[M_Chavez]

I don't have any insider knowledge in this particular case.
It's perfectly possible that several bidders were falling over each other to pay 2 months of UK average salary for a £20 sign.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Isn't it at least a 5k+ sign? I blame the television.