A condition report is the auction house standing in for the bidder’s own eyes and hands. Most bids in a modern sale come from people who will never see the lot before they own it, and they bid on the strength of the photographs, the provenance and the condition report. The report describes the physical state of the lot as the specialist found it: damage, repairs, restoration, wear, missing parts, completeness and, where relevant, whether the thing works.
Writing a useful report
The useful report is specific and unflattering. “Good condition for age” tells the bidder nothing. “Hairline crack to the rim at 2 o’clock, 15 mm, stable; old restoration to the handle, visible under UV; minor wear to the gilding on the foot” tells the bidder exactly what they are buying and protects the auction house if they complain. Photographs of the faults, taken in raking light, are worth more than adjectives. For categories with third-party grading, such as coins, cards and comics, the grade and the grading service do most of the work, and the report notes anything the holder does not show.
Condition and the conditions of sale
Almost every auction house sells as is and says in its conditions of sale that condition reports are opinions, not warranties. That disclaimer holds in the ordinary case. It does not hold where the report is wrong about something material that the auction house should have found, and it does not help the auction house’s reputation in any case. The practical rule is to write the report you would want to receive.
Condition reports in auction software
Condition reports should be a field on the lot record, published on the lot page or available at a click, with the fault photographs attached, rather than a PDF emailed on request the night before the sale. A platform that supports this cuts the pre-sale enquiry load and gives remote bidders the confidence to bid at the level the lot deserves; the bidder confidence checklist treats on-demand condition information as a basic requirement for online bidding, and Circuit’s lot record carries the report and its photographs alongside the description from cataloging to the sale page.
