Wine auctions and fine wine trading - the facts

Auction houses take around 10% in commissions from sellers.

They also take around 21%-23% in commissions from buyers, also known as buyer’s premium.

Private clients and the wine trade who buy wine at auction are savvy purchasers. They know what the lowest current market price of a particular wine is and will bid around 20%-25% below that price to take into account the high buyer’s premium they have to pay.

When you sell wine at auction, unless it’s an extremely rare wine, you are giving nearly a third of the realisable value away to the auction house.

Wine Owners is a self-directed way to sell wine at very low rates of commission, that puts the seller in control of the sales process, with access to reliable current market pricing data, so that you can be informed to decide your selling price.

Private individuals who use Wine Owners to sell fine wine realise similar or better prices than auction houses. The difference is we only charge between 4% and 6.5% in seller commissions and 2.5% in buyer commissions. So buyers purchase the wines they want at a good price and sellers keep the lion’s share of proceeds. Because of this, for every £10,000 of wine sold via Wine Owners, a seller realises net proceeds of approximately £2,250 more than if they had sold at auction.