Luxury Buyers Have Time To Wait—Sellers Are Turning to Auctions

As the national luxury market settles from its COVID-19 pandemic peak, more sellers are turning to auctions—offering an opening for the buyers who spent the boom getting outbid, priced out, or shut out of private deals.

Platinum Luxury Auctions, a Miami-based firm specializing in multimillion-dollar properties, contracted 29 homes for its auction process in 2025, nearly doubling its 2024 volume. By mid-June 2026, the company had already contracted 18 properties and projected that its full-year volume could reach 34 offerings.

While the word "auction" may conjure up images of foreclosure or fire sales, Platinum is part of a small, specialized group of firms that market nondistressed, high-value homes to sellers seeking a defined path to a deal after a conventional listing has failed to produce one.

And it's that certainty that may be driving the renewed appeal.

"We’ve joked that, 'We didn’t suddenly get much better at our job' in 2025 (and would like to instead think we’ve always been doing our jobs very well!)," Trayor Lesnock, founder and president of Platinum Luxury Auctions, told Realtor.com® in an email.

Instead, he said, the change reflects a market in which sellers are more willing to accept a fair-market outcome—and buyers who sat out the pandemic frenzy are beginning to move again.

Anthony Smith, senior economist at Realtor.com, sees the same shift in the balance of power.

“Rising luxury auction activity can indicate that leverage is shifting toward buyers,” he says. “Some of these sales may be urgent, but others may be more strategic, so it speaks to market timing, at least for now.”

A price floor is not the same as a deal

The national entry point to luxury reached $1,283,432 in May, down 1.4% from a year earlier, according to research from Realtor.com. It marked the 26th consecutive month of annual declines, although the pullback was far smaller than the more than 5% year-over-year drops recorded early in 2025.

That suggests the market may be finding its footing. However, it still leaves sellers in an awkward position. National luxury prices remain 13.7% below their pandemic-era peak, and the recovery varies dramatically by market.

Of the luxury markets Realtor.com tracks, only Minneapolis and Boise, ID, surpassed their pandemic-era highs, with list prices up 5% and 4.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, well-known luxury destinations such as San Francisco, San Jose, CA, Denver, Wailuku, HI, and Honolulu have all ceded their entire pandemic run-up, with list prices now below their pre-2020 baselines.

That shift signals something of a reckoning for the luxury market, which has seemed untouchable in recent years even as high mortgage rates and home prices weighed on everyone else. For the first time in a long time, buyers have more time to compare alternatives, question whether the property is worth the premium, and wait to see whether the seller will blink.

Platinum is not the only auction operator describing that problem. A separate 2025 analysis from Concierge Auctions, a competing luxury-auction firm, found a similar disconnect at the top of the market.

Its Luxury Homes Index found that ultraluxury homes took an average of 319 days to sell in 2024. Homes that sat for more than 180 days were sold for about 80% of list price, compared with roughly 87% for homes that were sold sooner, according to the report.

The findings are company research, not an industrywide census, but they reinforce the broader market condition Platinum says is driving more sellers toward auctions: Even at the upper end, a long time on the market can turn an ambitious asking price into a liability.

Platinum’s own data offers a glimpse of how that impasse can break. Pre-auction sales accounted for 26% of the firm’s 2025 transactions, up from a historical average of 10%. Those homes were sold for an average of 91% of their final list price—but only after sitting on the market for roughly 16 months.

Why luxury home auctions are back

To Smith, this is all part of a larger shift.

“It could reflect sellers trading the chance of a higher price for certainty of a sale,” he says. “That's less a new trend than a return to auctions' pre-pandemic role.”

Before the pandemic, auctions were one option for luxury sellers whose homes had lingered on the market—Platinum contracted 24 luxury auctions in 2019.

But that model became far less necessary once the pandemic housing boom took hold. Platinum’s volume fell to 10 contracted auctions in 2021 and remained at 10 in 2022, as scarce inventory, bidding wars, and a surge in off-market deals gave sellers extraordinary control.

“When buyer demand was so strong that many luxury properties were receiving multiple offers at—or even above—their list price, along with an enormous surge in so-called ‘Off-Market’ sales, it stands to reason that the luxury auction® process ... was not in high demand,” Lesnock said in the email.

While buyers competed to prove that a seller’s asking price was real during the boom, sellers now are the ones testing whether that price still holds—and auctions give them a deadline for finding out.

In a conventional luxury sale, the gap between a seller’s expectations and a buyer’s willingness to pay can stretch across months of private showings, quiet negotiations, and incremental price cuts. An auction compresses that process into a defined decision window.

“For both Seller and Buyer, the luxury auction® creates ‘Date-Certainty,’” Lesnock explained. "The parties know the given property will be sold by a certain time and under certain, clear terms."

Even so, that certainty comes with trade-offs.

“Those terms are ‘surgically clean,’” Lesnock added. The sale is noncontingent and not open to negotiation—two features that can reduce the delays and deal-killing friction common in luxury transactions.

And in a broader environment defined by stalemate and indecision, that certainty can do something months of listing activity cannot: force both sides to decide whether they are ready to make a deal.

Not every luxury buyer has the same leverage

But the return of luxury auctions doesn't necessarily signal the entire market is opening up in the same way.

“Luxury doesn't move as one market,” Smith says. “It moves independently from the broader housing market, and even within luxury, there are several levels.”

That distinction is especially important. Nationally, entry-level luxury begins at the 90th percentile, or about $1.28 million. High-end luxury begins around $2 million, while ultraluxury begins above $5.56 million.

And even within those price bands are very different buyers, financing profiles, and levels of urgency.

“The higher up the luxury ladder, the more likely a purchase is cash,” Smith says. “Lower luxury tiers, especially in lower cost-of-living areas, still see real mortgage activity.”

That may make auctions particularly relevant in the wide middle of luxury: homes expensive enough to have a limited buyer pool, but not necessarily so singular or globally coveted that a deep-pocketed cash buyer will simply appear at the seller’s preferred price.

A seller of a $2 million to $5 million home may have fewer qualified buyers than a conventional seller, but may not have the global audience available to a trophy property in Aspen, CO, or Manhattan.

The property may still be exceptional, but the question of whether it can fetch its asking price remains open.

Buyers at the edge of luxury may also be weighing mortgage rates, job security, and whether a home bought or listed near the peak makes sense at today’s carrying costs.

“That’s where the exposure sits: Buyers at the fringe of luxury who took on a mortgage face more financial fluctuation risk than the top tier’s comfortably cash-based buyers,” Smith says.

Luxury auctions are a niche, but their growing popularity offers a lesson for the wider housing market. When buyers and sellers cannot agree on price, certainty alone can be valuable—whether that's a deadline or a firm set of terms.