I am by instinct someone that prefers to look forward to personal targets and business goals rather than look back. What’s gone is gone. However the seasonal break is the one time of the year when I allow myself to reflect back on past events. Maybe it’s the long dark evenings sat at home with a glass of wine but whatever the reason my mind enjoys the exercise.

Some are easy to appreciate, with the £1.5million of property Biddle & Webb sold last year a personal highlight, and the continued expansion of our weekly Commercial Sale something the whole business takes pride in. We had just calculated following the final December auction that the commercial sales had raised a hammer total for the year of £1.9million.

Add in a couple of family milestones and I was feeling quite content when my mind alighted on a small almost hidden event that on reflection may turn out to be one of the most important for the business.

The moment I recalled was that we had signed up and verified a buyer to bid on-line for a property.

Hardly you might think a big thing, but for us a significant moment.

Biddle & Webb has invested extensively in computer technology and software, and 2018 has seen us crack the major issue holding back all other live auction bidding platforms – getting the audio and visual feed of the auctioneer to sync in real time to the live action in the room. Our live, real time bidding platform now offers this with a delay of less that ½ a second, so effectively simultaneous to the action in the auction room. No other auction bidding platform offers this.

Our buyers can now log into their accounts via the website www.biddleandwebb.com and watch, hear and bid with total confidence, as though they are in the room. This software was used throughout 2018 with on line bidders at our weekly commercial auction spending over £1million. It was this that gave us the confidence to offer live on-line bidding to our bidders at the last property auction of 2018. With property lots selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds the technology has to be bullet proof, and it now is.

That the on-line bidder was out bid by a person in the room is not really the point.

We can offer with confidence live at distance bidding via our website to buyers across the UK. This is what my mind idly wandered to as the “big” success of last year, a single person bidding on one lot.

Jeremy Thornton