We are now deep into the summer slow-down. Two sales from this past week were archived along with four from July. There's a logic to conducting sales in the summer months: [1] Material held for a while or bought-in earlier often still needs to be sold, [2] inveterate auction buyers looking for regular fixes may be tempted to bid more widely when the market is thinner and of course [3] cash flow. Sales in the summer have for years generally been pretty good but not widely discussed.

The total receipts for these recent sales were $1,161,732, the percentage of lots sold 67%, the percentage of aggregate high estimate achieved - 63. You don't need to look at the calendar or out the window to know it's summer. These numbers tell you. The good news is that fall is approaching. Come the change of seasons I expect a change in fortune.

So where does the ketch-up come in? We're busy catching up ourselves. The long planned doubling of the AED is under way. Evidence of it is in the posted numbers on our home page: XXXXXXX records in the AED. A week ago we announced that the AED had reached 2.5 million records. A week later this number is 2,583,644. This is a long process, not a quick one. We're going to 5.0.

This coming week we begin beta testing the next generation of the AE site. There are always headaches. Adding to the complexity is our migration to more robust databases. No date for the release of the new site has been announced but mid-September is likely. We also now know that we will introduce a second set of changes a month later. We view the initial cut-over to the new, cleaner and much faster version of the current site be step one. A month later we'll bring some new thinking to the game.

So, while the auction segment takes a month or so off to recover we are bearing down. Most changes to the works on paper field have come from without; the internet and increasingly global searches to name two of the most important. Little important change has come from within the field. It's almost always been counter-punching. Sometime in September we'll release a fresh concept of the site and in October our version of the "empire strikes back." The concept is right. If the field embraces this new thinking I believe hope can be quickly restored and health to the overall field follow within a few years.

Bruce McKinney
AE