You marketed it for six weeks and spent real money doing it. Now a six-figure sale comes down to how clean the last two minutes run — and most platforms want a slice of that hammer just for hosting the page. Hammerwerks is built for that afternoon, and it doesn’t take a cut for showing up.
A real estate auction isn’t a hundred small lots where one misfire washes out. It’s the one lot. Someone bids in the last eight seconds, or you almost drop the hammer and remember the reserve a half-second late, or your best buyer couldn’t make it and left word with you. On a property you can’t un-sell, the finish has to hold.
Set a soft close and every late bid pushes the clock a few minutes. The property sells when the bidding actually stops — not when a sniper’s timer beats the buyer who was willing to go higher. On a six-figure lot that isn’t a nicety. It’s the difference between a clean sale and a phone call from an underbidder who thinks he got robbed.
Reserve is set per property. Run it absolute — no reserve, sells to the high bid. Or reserved, so it won’t hammer under the number. Or reserved with a warning that asks you to confirm before it goes below. The software won’t let a half-second reflex cost the seller their floor on a house that can’t be un-sold.
A buyer who can’t sit at the screen leaves a max bid, and the software proxies it up for them only as far as it has to. Run the sale online-timed so it closes itself, or live from the clerk console with fair warning and the hammer. Buyer’s premium is figured in either way.
You shot forty photos — the drone pass, every room, the outbuildings — and half the platforms out there cap you at twelve and bury the parcel details in a text box built for a crate of tools. A house that’s asking six figures should look like it on the page.
No photo cap. The drone pass, every room, the outbuildings, the plat map — put them all up. The listing shows them as a swipeable gallery with lightbox zoom, so a buyer three states away can actually walk the property before they bid. Not twelve-and-done.
Beds, baths, square footage, acreage, year built, parcel number, taxes — shown where a buyer reads them, instead of crammed into a ‘notes’ box that was built for a box of hand tools. A property page that carries the weight of what you’re asking for it.
Your photographer’s standing in the driveway with the whole shoot on her phone and no clean way to get it to you. Send a scoped, no-login link and she puts every photo straight into your workbench — no account, no app to install. Revoke it the minute she’s done. Same link works for a co-broker or an assistant walking the property.
Here’s the math that stings on real estate: a platform takes a percentage of the hammer, so the bigger your sale, the bigger their check — for hosting a web page you drove all the traffic to. And the buyers you spent real money to bring in quietly become somebody else’s marketplace asset. Neither one sits right.
No commission on the hammer — the same flat monthly price whether the property closes at $80,000 or $800,000. A percentage house would take a piece of that six-figure hammer; we take none. You pay by lot volume — Solo $99/mo covers up to 200 lots, plenty for a real-estate calendar — and there’s no per-bidder fee. You did the marketing; you keep the money it made.
The sale runs on your own branded bidder site, and the buyers who register are yours — export the whole list any time. The people you spent real money to bring in don’t become a marketplace’s property. Next auction, you already know who to call.
When the hammer falls, Hammerwerks records the winning bid and cuts the buyer’s invoice with the premium on it. Take a deposit through Stripe at registration if you want the bidding kept to serious money. Earnest money, the purchase agreement, title, the closing table — that stays in your real estate workflow, where it belongs.
You’ve seen software confidently invent a number, and you know what an invented number does to your credibility the second a buyer knows the market better than the box does. Hammerwerks’ cataloging AI is built to draft personal-property lots from photos — a title, a description, a value range, each with a confidence score, always for you to approve. On real property it doesn’t pretend. Too many variables, too thin a market. It tells you it’s out of its depth instead of handing you a number that gets you laughed off the podium. The valuation was always going to be yours. It stays yours.
No — and it shouldn’t. Hammerwerks records the winning bid and generates the buyer’s invoice. Earnest money escrow, the purchase agreement, title work, the closing table — that’s your existing real estate workflow, and it stays there. The platform’s job is to run a clean sale and hand you a clean result, not to pretend it can close a property.
Yes. Bidders register through your catalog and verify their email, and you can require a deposit through Stripe before anyone bids — applied to the invoice if they win, refunded if they don’t. On a property that deserves real buyers, it keeps the bidding to people with money actually on the line.
Yes. Reserve is enforced per lot, so one sale can hold an absolute property that sells to the high bid right alongside a reserved one that won’t hammer under the number — or one set to warn you before it goes below. You decide property by property; the software keeps each one honest to how you set it.
Not today, and I’ll be straight about why — MLS access is per-region and heavily regulated, and it’s not something a general auction platform should fake. What Hammerwerks does is host the auction catalog cleanly. Link out to your MLS entry, or cross-post the listing URL wherever your buyers already look.
Honestly, no. Their registered-bidder pools are huge and ours is small and new; if raw reach is the whole game, they win it, and you can list there too. But most real estate auctioneers already bring their own buyers — the marketing was yours anyway. What you get here is your own branded sale, a buyer list that stays yours, and a fee that doesn’t scale with the hammer. That’s the trade.
Yes, and that’s where the deeper machinery lives. For personal property you get a consignment agreement the seller signs and you countersign — tamper-evident, so you can prove later nothing changed — a settlement statement that settles against that signed contract, per-seller commission, a payout ledger, and a 1099 worksheet at year end. That’s built for the personal-property sale, not the real estate close. But plenty of you run both, and it’s the same tool.
No commission on the hammer, ever, and no per-bidder fee. You pay a flat monthly tier by how many lots you run — Solo $99 (200 lots), Growth $299 (1,000), Scale $799 (5,000), 50¢/lot above that — plus a one-time $499 setup that’s waived with a promo code. On a six-figure property that means a marketplace’s percentage never touches your hammer. 30-day money-back, full data export any time.
30-day money-back if it doesn’t earn its keep on your first sale. Cancel anytime, and your data exports whenever you want it.