BACK IN THE 1990's dealer's lifestyle.

Back in the day before the internet, car auctions were a whole different experience. You'd arrive at the auction, check in with your ID, and pick up two books from the front desk: one listing cars by selling order and another sorted by chassis type. You’d find a seat to bid, look up the cars you were interested in, and note their auction numbers and positions. Then, you'd quickly march to inspect the vehicles in selling order. Balancing car checks with bidding was tricky, occasionally arriving too late to bid on the car! If you had a team, one person would bid while the other inspected vehicles. The inspecting member would check the car while talking on a phone with customers overseas, racking up expensive international call charges.

The rush of it all often led to overlooked "minor" auction sheet notes, which sometimes turned into major issues after purchase. This chaos was the used car auction export lifestyle. In your spare time, you’d chat with fellow exporters and customers, mostly from New Zealand, and occasionally from Ireland and the UK. Your auction world was limited to local auctions, with no thought of other auction houses in Japan. Your little auction world was where car availability started and ended.

What does this have to do with the TAA auctions?

Well, when cars don’t sell at one auction, they often move on to the next auction house. So you would recognise the identical vehicles a few days later in a different auction house. I noticed then the big grade differences between the auctions. TAA would give a car a grade 3, while the same car a few days later would get a grade 4 at a different auction! What? Did someone take the car away and panel beat and paint out those imprefections? This didn’t happen once and solidified the impression of TAA’s strict grading. When you are the buyer in auctions, you DO want a strict auction inspection. Everything, including all the flaws, are listed on the auction sheet meaning there were no unwanted surprises later on. You can confidently bid in the TAA auctions, Japan's strictest auction houses.

Typed Auction sheets (PHEW!).

Secondly, the auction sheets at TAA were all typed, compared to other Japanese auctions, where they hand-write the sheets. I’m fairly confident in my ability to read auction sheets. But sometimes, handwritten Japanese is messy and hard to read.

Let’s check your reading ability. Are you confident in reading an English doctor's prescription? You would be if it was typed out!

Yes, this is supposed to be English; your life depends on the chemist's reading ability!