LiveAuctioneers Brand Guidelines: A 2002 New York Bidding Platform, Part of ATG Since 2021

A bidding marketplace for other people’s sales.

LiveAuctioneers is an online marketplace on which auction houses offer their sales to bidders over the internet. It is based in New York City. Auction Technology Group (ATG), the London company that bought it in 2021, says it was founded in 2002, and describes it as a curated marketplace for live auctions of collectibles, antiques and fine art, focused on the North American art and antiques segment.

The model differs from that of a saleroom house. The sales on LiveAuctioneers are run by its partner auctioneers; the platform supplies technology, client support and digital marketing to them, ATG’s June 2021 announcement says. That announcement put the network at about 1,600 auctioneers from about 70 countries as at 31 March 2021. Bidders can search, bid and buy on the website and through the company’s iOS and Android apps, the same document says. In ATG’s figures for 2020, more than 1.2 million items were sold at more than 27,000 auctions on the marketplace, which had more than one million registered bidders and almost 120,000 active bidders that year.

The categories are broad. ATG’s brands page today calls LiveAuctioneers “one of North America’s favourite destinations for fine and decorative art, antiques, vintage collectables and luxury goods,” and the 2021 announcement said the platform worked with a wide range of auction houses, with no heavy reliance on any one of them and coverage across many categories.

Payments became part of the offer in December 2020. According to ATG, LiveAuctioneers launched a payments service that month to help auctioneers collect funds from winning bidders faster, and by 2021 ATG was describing it as a key selling point of the platform, listing faster collection, help with chargebacks, less work for an auctioneer’s collection team and, for buyers, an Autopay option and a choice of payment methods.

Private equity, then a London listing.

Before its sale, LiveAuctioneers was majority owned by Cove Hill Partners, a Boston private equity firm that ATG described as long-term oriented. ATG’s June 2021 announcement put Cove Hill’s holding at about 85 per cent on a fully diluted basis, with certain managers and employees of LiveAuctioneers holding about 14 per cent and existing finance providers about one per cent; in all, about 30 shareholders and option holders. The company being bought was its holding company, Platinum Parent, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and the buyer was ATG Media US, Inc., an indirect subsidiary of ATG.

The buyer came from the British antiques trade. ATG traces its own history to the Antiques Trade Gazette, founded in 1971; it says it began listing auction calendars online in 1998, launched live bidding for art and antiques auctions on the-saleroom.com in 2006, bought the German marketplace Lot-tissimo in 2018 and merged with the American marketplace Proxibid in 2020. ATG joined the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange in 2021 and is headquartered in London.

The deal moved in stages. ATG announced the proposed acquisition on 17 June 2021 and sent a circular to its shareholders on 4 August 2021. On 29 September 2021 it said it had received all the antitrust and regulatory clearances it needed, including from the UK Competition and Markets Authority, and the acquisition completed on 1 October 2021, according to ATG’s announcement that day. City A.M. reported the completion on 1 October 2021, writing that the purchase would open up the US auction market to the British company.

ATG said at the time that LiveAuctioneers’ chief executive, Phil Michaelson, and its chief technology officer, Rob Cummings, would remain involved in the business and continue to run LiveAuctioneers in North America, and that they and other managers had agreed to keep a shareholding in the enlarged group.

Auction houses and online platforms.

Auction houses and online auction platforms sell other people’s objects, so most of what they publish is about the lots rather than about themselves. The catalogue is the core document: a printed or online book for each sale, with a cover image chosen from the lots, a number and a description for each piece, and notes on where it came from. Many houses now publish the same catalogue as a web page and as a download, and some give a single important lot a catalogue of its own.

Lot photography sets much of the tone. Paintings are usually shown flat and square to the camera, furniture and objects against a plain ground, and jewellery and small pieces close up, so that a bidder in another city can judge them from a screen. The saleroom itself is the other stage: a rostrum, rows of chairs, a wall or screen for the lot on sale and a bank of telephones for absent bidders, as the houses show it in their own photographs and broadcasts.

Online bidding has added a third face. Houses and platforms publish apps and web pages for live and timed sales, with a lot image, the current bid, a countdown or a live video feed, and buttons for bidding and watching lots. Their sites also carry the practical pages, such as viewing hours, addresses of offices and salerooms, and how to consign or collect.

Corporate pages are usually short. They give a founding date, the offices and salerooms, and sometimes the names of owners or of the group a house now belongs to. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house — who founded it, who owns it and where it sells — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One marketplace among several.

Inside ATG, LiveAuctioneers sits beside other marketplaces that the group lists on its website, among them The Saleroom, Proxibid, BidSpotter and Lot-tissimo, along with auction software such as Auction Mobility and Wavebid. ATG says more than 3,900 auction houses use its platforms, and that across the group it offers timed online-only auctions, live and hybrid auctions, fixed-price listings and white-label solutions. Its 2021 announcement presented LiveAuctioneers as the group’s entry into the North American art and antiques segment, and set out a plan to make payments, back-office and marketing services available to the partner auction houses of both businesses. The same document said LiveAuctioneers’ auctioneers could also draw on Auction Mobility, the American auction-software business ATG bought in 2020, to build out their own white-label offering and their own brands alongside the group’s marketplaces.

The group has added shared services since the purchase. ATG says its Global Auction Platform, launched in 2013, powers its marketplaces; that it rolled out atgShip, an integrated shipping service, in 2023 and atgXL, a cross-listing product, in 2024; and that atgPay provides an integrated checkout for auctioneers and their winning bidders. In 2023 ATG also bought EstateSales.NET, a United States estate-sales listing site, its history page says.

For a design guide, LiveAuctioneers shows a marketplace brand that frames other auction houses’ catalogues rather than its own saleroom. Compare Catawiki, a Dutch online auction platform with its own specialists, and Heritage Auctions, an American auction house built from a 1982 merger of two coin dealers. For this guide we use a deep green, an ivory and a brass tone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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