Advice: bidding on a bike

So, you're still determined to buy a bike, but after weeks of trawling BikeSales.com.au, an increasing number of dealer's showrooms and even the local rag's classifieds, you still haven't found exactly what you want.

Well, there is another avenue left to you - and while you'll need some knowledge, the good news is that chances are, you'll be able to snare a bargain.

Of course, we're talking about buying at an auction. It's not for the faint-hearted - buying at an auction requires that you know what you want and have an iron will, but it's not really as scary as it seems.

If nothing else, auctions are where many dealers buy and sell stock, where some fleets and private owners elect to sell their machines - and where lots of crashed bikes are sold on behalf of insurance companies. More of this later.

There are two types of auction - the online websites like Grey's Online, OzAuction and the ubiquitous eBay, and the real, live go-and-touch-it type auctions run by companies like Shannons, Pickles and Manheim-Fowles.

On the major online sites, buyers are invited to bid on and buy stuff they usually can't see or touch, based solely on the seller's often badly-worded and brief description and some dodgy photos. You'll see dirt-bikes advertised with a photo taken on a phone, with a description of, "Reliable bike, goes good" - and the optimistic seller expects you to spend upwards of $6000, sight unseen.

It's rare that these bikes get sold, but lots of good pictures and a clear description (with decent spelling!) will often see the bike finding a new home.

Then the buyer has to send money and trust the seller to ship the item safely. To be fair, things usually go smoothly, but occasionally what you get is not really what you bought. With online auctions, you do have a brief period in which to ask questions and ultimately, it's up to you whether you bid on an item or not.

The alternative is the time-honoured public auction. Here you can go and inspect the vehicles the day before and there is an online catalogue with decent pictures and a minimalist description. Once the sale starts, you can bid online or in person at the venue, but generally, there's no-one who knows the history of what's being sold, beyond that which is in the catalogue.

Now's the time for some disclosure: over the last couple of years, I've bought three bikes and sold two on eBay, ranging from 80 to 750cc. All the bikes I bought at what I considered to be fair prices, with known and acknowledged defects, and the bikes I sold had exhaustive descriptions and returned good prices.

I've also bought a couple of written-off bikes or incomplete from dealers and rebuilt them, variously keeping them from a few weeks to a few years before moving them along. But I'd never bought a bike at a live auction before.

Until now.

Manheim-Fowles is the nationwide love-child of a huge international vehicle-remarketing organisation and an established Australian family business. Fowles have been auctioning vehicles for years from sites all round Australia, while around the world, Manheim sells about 12 million used cars a year and has a turnover of something over $60 billion; they are a Big Deal in the global motor industry - and just part of another privately-owned company.

What they shift in terms of cars and trucks beggars belief, but it's the motorcycle side of the business that interests us; they conduct monthly sales in all the major cities, usually with dozens of bikes on offer.

Some of the bikes come from long-standing contracts, such as AusPost or Victoria Police. It's a rare auction if there isn't a fleet of red kerb-hopping Postie-bikes for sale and according to Campbell Jones, GM of Salvage operations nationwide for Manheim-Fowles, relatively few Posties get re-registered - meaning they're probably heading for a new life in the paddocks of Australia, with a chainsaw on the rack and a kelpie on the pillion.

Having ridden a postie-bike from Brisvegas to Adelaide through the Outback, I can't speak highly enough of these quirky little bikes. The auction I attended saw 24 Posties up for sale; most were three years old, had just under 30,000km on the clock and went for between $800 and $1100.

Police bikes are also sold when they're two or three years old and have covered about 50,000km before they head off for a new life in civvy street; three R1200RTs went for between $10,000 and $11,000. And no, you don't get to keep the flashing lights, siren or radios.

Potential buyers should be aware that ex-Police bikes carry a certain stigma and it's not just from the doughnut glaze. They will have a single seat, some odd holes from law-enforcement equipment - and while they're usually scrupulously maintained, a lot of their daily work will have been trundling around town, so clutch, gearbox and brake wear is usually high.

Other bikes can come from other fleet clearances, such as quad-bikes from the DSE or Parks ($2400 and rough to $3300 and good) repossessions, stolen-and-recovereds, insurance write-offs and brand-new machines from private sellers. There were even a couple of race-bikes, at least one of which was also a "stolen-and-recovered". The auction I attended had about 100 bikes from all these sources.

There were two brand-new Chinese quad-bikes on offer - both were passed in as the vendor would seem to have a higher expectation than the marketplace; similar machines are ten a'penny on eBay.

It's no secret that those suburban motorcycle dealers that we all rely upon so heavily use the auctions too. They might buy stock there if something looks interesting, pick up a wreck for stripping or to keep the workshop busy in slow times, or they might sell off a few bikes which have been hanging around the showroom for too long. The day I went, I recognised a few faces from "The Trade".

Buyers can see if there's something that interests them online in the days or weeks before the auction and, thanks to the wizardry of the web, they can bid - and even buy - online too.

Of course, there are a few drawbacks to buying at auction, which aren't the case in buying either privately or from a dealer via BikeSales.com.au; for a start, there are no test-rides at auction - so it's down to eye-balling each bike to make sure it's straight.

Furthermore, motorcycles are usually sold unregistered, there is no cooling-off period and no guarantee, so it's very much a case of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

However, buying at auction does give access to bikes which you probably won't find elsewhere - the lightly-damaged insurance write-offs. These are bikes which have been replaced by insurance company because the cost of replacing damaged parts with new ones has made them economically unviable to repair.

But for the happy home tinkerer who can spend hours reshaping plastic parts or can live with a re-covered seat, non-standard levers and blinkers, these machines represent the chance to get onto something they couldn't normally afford.

Or, for the dedicated collector, there are the severely totalled bikes which are permanently written-off and unable to be re-registered, but which can be a good source of parts. One such was a totalled Triumph Daytona 675 with a detached front end, which sold for $1700, or a 3-wheeled Piaggio MP3 400 scooter, which netted just $1000.

So, in the interests of this story, I went along to a recent Melbourne auction alongside the Geelong freeway in Altona. Problem One is getting there, as there are no convenient nearby off-ramps. Don't be put off by the hundreds or even thousands of other people streaming into the place - mostly, they'll be there for the seven lanes of drive-through auctions of cars, light trucks and utes or for the commercial vehicles, tractors, buses, boats, caravans or crashed cars.

Registering as a potential buyer is free and the work of minutes, but a printed booklet of details of what's for sale costs $3. You can also find the same info online for nothing. You get a large Bidder's number -- and be careful how you wave it around, because it's how the auctioneers identify bidders.

Once bidding starts, it's all action - it takes about 90 seconds to deal with each bike. Pictures of each one are flashed up on a screen, while the current bid is displayed on another.

It'll take a few minutes before you have a clue what the auctioneer is saying, but when his assistant shouts what sounds like "Shit", the screen indicates an online bid and he'll invite bids from the audience.

If you wave your bidder's number or otherwise indicate that you'll pledge some cash on the current sale and you're the last man standing, you'll be the new owner - simple as that.

In a couple of hours, the high-energy auctioneer has cleared the decks and the echoing hall rapidly empties; then it's a matter of paying a deposit, fetching the trailer, paying the balance, loading up and heading out with your new toy.

Astute auction-watchers will notice that some bikes don't leave and they are offered for sale at the next auction; these will be bikes which haven't reached their basic asking price and will be re-auctioned in the hope of getting higher bids. One such example is a very clean 2009 Suzuki 650 V-Strom that attracted a $6400 online bid, but which was back in the next auction.

There are a few charges for successful bidders: if you buy a postie-bike, there's a flat 13.75% buyer's admin fee; if you spend over $1000 on something other than a postie, there's a 7.15% fee and if you elect to 'bid & buy' online, there's another $33 fee. A compulsory $26 guarantees that the bike has been run through the Stolen Vehicle and Written-off Vehicle registers and VicRoads permits were available on-site if what you've bought can be ridden away.

Bear in mind that, unlike buying from a private advertiser or a dealer, at an auction there's no guarantee, no test-ride, no advice, no history, no come-back, and that you've got 48 hours to move anything you might have bought.

With that in mind, buying at auction may not be for you. But if you're comfortable with all that, there are some bargains to be had. Just be careful about scratching your ear - I think that's how I bought an Aprilia….