20 For 20: The Auction That Started the KC Auction Company

By Jason R. Roske

This is the first installment of our 20 for 20 series. As KC Auction & Appraisal Company celebrates its 20th anniversary, I’ve been looking back at the auctions, collections, partnerships, and moments that shaped the business. Over the coming months I’ll be sharing some of those stories. Some involve remarkable objects, others memorable auctions, and some are simply about the people and experiences that made the last twenty years possible. I invite you to read along and share your own stories with us. What’s your favorite KC Auction Company purchase or memory?

I started the auction company in the gallery format in June of 2006. I had conducted a few on-site auctions before that, but we believed there was room for a consignment auction gallery in Kansas City.

At the time, the auction landscape in the area was changing. Jerry Stricker down in Gardner was retiring. There was a small auction house in Independence that sold anything that came through the doors. The only other auction house near Kansas City was run by a guy who later ended up going to jail for failing to pay his consignors.

My introduction to auctions came through the buying and selling business I had been doing for years.

When I was really young, my mom dragged my brother Brent and me to garage sales. Mom was looking for ways to stretch a budget, and she liked Depression Glass. Brent and I hated these trips. We could sit in the car and complain about the heat, or we could go into the sales with Mom and see if we could convince her to buy us a toy, a book, or something fun.

Eventually that led me to buying and selling baseball cards as a teenager. My dad would drive me to card shows so I could set up a table and sell. Later, when my parents and I moved to Kansas City, I was working the graveyard shift and Mom had Fridays off. We started going to garage sales together every week.

Before long I was buying all kinds of interesting things.

At one point I lost my job and tried selling the antiques I had collected to make the payment on my truck. I ran out of things to sell before the truck was paid off and it ended up being repossessed. Not exactly a success story. But the idea of buying and selling for a living had taken hold.

I started doing flea markets, antique shows, and eventually rented booths in antique malls. Then I began selling on eBay. For a while Stacey worked with me and we were part of the original group of eBay Power Sellers.

We even went to the eBay conference in New Orleans, where I bought the light box that we still use for photography today.

Then William was born.

Most of you know William today as the young man working in the business and helping develop our Coin Division. But when he was born, I was dragging him along to estate sales.

When we moved back to Kansas City, I opened an antique shop. Antique stores can be great, but they can also be very hit or miss. One thing I always noticed was that the auctioneers always had merchandise to sell and buyers ready to buy it. They didn’t get retail prices, but they always got paid.

That observation eventually led me to the idea of becoming an auctioneer myself.

After graduating from the Missouri Auction School, I conducted a couple of on-site estate auctions. But I kept getting calls from people who only had a few items to sell. Not enough to justify a full estate auction, but still worthwhile pieces.

That realization led to the idea of opening an auction house. Instead of relying on one estate at a time, we could combine items from multiple consignors and conduct auctions that made sense.

We found a space in the West Bottoms in Kansas City.

At the time, the West Bottoms was known more for hookers, drugs, and crime than for antiques, flea markets, and auctions. But if you knew what you were looking at, you could see the early stages of a transformation beginning.

It was a great location that was easy to get to, and downtown Kansas City was already being redeveloped. The Crossroads were taking off and the Sprint Center, now the T-Mobile Center, was being built. The buildings that had survived all had great bones and large open spaces.

Another advantage was that the city was not overly involved at the time. They were simply happy to see activity happening in the district.

That meant we could do things like build a giant sign on the roof of our building out of one-inch thick Styrofoam insulation cut into the shape of a gavel and painted blue.

My buddy Kevin and I spent a couple of days cutting the foam into letters and shapes, painting everything our signature blue, and gluing it to the brick wall and elevator shaft on top of the building.

Our directions to customers were simple:

“When you’re coming down the 12th Street Bridge, look to your right. If you see a big blue gavel on top of a building, that’s where you’re going.”

And surprisingly, it worked.

The first auction is memorable only because it was the first.

We sold about 180 lots to 22 bidders in the room. There were no online bids, phone bids, or absentee bids. If you weren’t physically there, you weren’t bidding.

This was before online calendars for auctions or estate sales existed. Long before email marketing lists. YouTube was in Beta still.

That first auction produced $2,200 in total bids.

I couldn’t tell you a single item that sold that night. The majority of what we sold belonged to me.

By most measures it was a disaster.

But we made enough money to pay the staff and the rent.

I still had storage units full of merchandise, so we scheduled the next auction two weeks later. We even had a couple of small consignments to include.

For the first time, I could start to see the vision forming.

There were also plenty of negative voices in those early days. More than once someone told me we wouldn’t last three months.

Being stubborn turned out to be useful.

Twenty years and hundreds of auctions later, we’re still here.

The market has changed dramatically during those two decades. Auctions have moved from in-person rooms to global online bidding. The types of items we sell have evolved. The technology has changed.

But the core idea remains the same.

Bring interesting things to market and let buyers decide what they are worth.

We still have our disasters too. In fact, my son just walked into my office and informed me that he destroyed our leaf blower.

There goes a couple hundred dollars.

None of us could have predicted that that first auction would lead to hundreds of auctions, millions of dollars in sales, three commercial buildings, lifelong friendships, and stories for days. I hope you’ll join me as I reflect on those things and many more in the 20 for 20 series.

What KC Auction Company story would you like to read about next?