Booming Beloit Auction buys Hanson's property

When the new building will go up and how big it will be has yet to be decided.

“We’re talking to the construction companies right now,” said David Allen, who bought the business from Richard and Pat Ranft in January 2023. “We’re looking at 25,000 to 40,000 square feet, but that’s going to come down to cost.”

The extra space is a must because of the aging Baby Boomer Generation. Beloit Auction conducts about 100 auctions a year, the vast majority are families that are selling off their parents’ possessions either because they’ve died or they are moving into retirement facilities.

“We’ll get a call and an hour later we are their best friends,” said Allen, who moved to Beloit from Manitowoc in 2013 to work for the Ranfts with the goal of eventually buying the business. “They don’t want all of the stuff their parents have collected. They don’t have the time to go through it. They’ll hand us the keys and tell us to send them a check when it’s over.”

According to PrimeIQ Research Private Ltd., the auction industry is growing by 10% a year, blooming from a $1 billion industry in 2022 to a $2.15 billion industry by 2030.

“It’s going to be even bigger than that,” said Ranft, when told of the industry projections. Richard and Pat still work at Beloit Auction daily. “We’re seeing the biggest transfer of wealth in world history. The auction industry isn’t going to see all of it, but it’s going to see a lot of it.”

Since the mid-1980s, after Richard Ranft took over the business from his parents, Beloit Auction has operated mainly out of a 19,000-square-foot building at 534 W. Grand Avenue. In 2019, needing more space, the Ranfts bought a 5,000-square-foot former pet store at 1525 Sun Valley Drive.

The auctions now are entirely run online. That has been both good and bad for auctioneers.

The online revolution has opened the auctions to world bidders. It’s common now to have more than 300 winning bidders at auctions that years ago would have drawn a few dozen people from surrounding counties.

“It’s a lot more prep work now,” Allen said of the downside. “You have to have good photos and good descriptions of every item. In the past, you just held something up and started the bidding.”

Today, there are 18 employees daily moving items in and out, prepping some for shipping, others for auction. The company has a handful of shipping containers holding even more stuff and neither building has loading docs for trucks. There are between 700 and 1,000 items in the buildings at any one time.

Just doing the math, it’s likely that more than 2 million items have moved through Beloit Auction’s doors over the years. Some have been memorable. In 2006, Beloit Auction made national news when it auctioned off a Jackson Pollock painting that had been found in the attic of a Milwaukee architect. The eventual winning bid was $53,000 from a collector in Texas and the auction’s outcome was reported in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Ranft remembered a customer bringing in old money found in a book. They were bank notes signed by the bank president from the 1840s. Ranft wasn’t sure how much the money would be worth. When it went up for auction, two bidders battled it out until it sold for about $14,000.

“I talked to the guy who won. He said there are only two guys who collect that kind of money so he knew who he was bidding against,” Ranft said. “He wasn’t going to let the other guy win no matter he bid. You meet some real characters in this business.”

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