How to use an Auction House in LOTRO

Sometimes you'll find an item that is very valuable, but you can't actually use it, or you'll start to craft items that are pretty useful and that many people won't have. What do you do? In LOTRO, you auction them at an Auction House.

I have been working hard at improving my jewellery craft recently (as regular readers will probably have spotted from the number of posts on crafting) and I started to make some gold jewellery. Looking at the price I could get from selling it to an NPC trader, I decided to see if I could raise a bit more money by auctioning some of the goods.

I headed down to the Bree Auction Hall and went up to an Auctioneer. You talk to them (they're NPCs) and ask to put an item up for auction. All you have to do is drag an item into the box, set a time for it to remain up for auction and also set a minimum price if you want to - which is set by default to the price you could sell the item for to an NPC.

There is a small fee for posting an item - from 50 copper pieces to around a silver piece, for the small pieces of jewellery I was selling. I was slightly concerned though that the Hall was empty and there wasn't anything else up for auction. Nontheless, I went ahead and set the items to sell for a day.

As soon as you put an item up for auction, it disappears from your inventory. Also note that you can't auction bound items, that is items that have been bound to only be used by your character, which is often the case with quest rewards. So you have some high value items that you can only realise by selling to an NPC.

If an items sells at auction, you are sent the item in the post. If it doesn't, as none of mine did, you are sent the item back by the in game mail system, and can pick it back up at a mailbox and detach it from the mail and back into your inventory. This is what happened to my items in my first LOTRO auction, so I ended up not only not selling them for more money, but losing my listing fee on top.

The trick to auctioning in LOTRO, I guess, is not only to set a good price, which I did, but also to make sure you use an auction house that is well frequented and you should be able to tell this by seeing what else is being offered for auction at the time. If there's not much, then avoid listing there.

EDIT 1: I've just been told that the Auction Houses are actually linked, so it doesn't matter which house you use to place your item, people will see it and therefore be able to bid using any Auction House in LOTRO. I need to go back and try this again then, because there was next to nobody using the auctioning in LOTRO when I last used it, which means either there aren't enough players on the server, or auctioning hasn't taken off, and they are going to try to engineer more use of auctioning in LOTRO with the Book 10 patch.

EDIT 2: I have so misunderstood the Auction House functionality in LOTRO. The reason why every Auction House looks empty in LOTRO is that when you select a category of item you want to look for, you must press the Search button at the bottom of the dialog. Without doing this, nothing will be listed. As it's such a large database of items up for auction, the items aren't listed automatically, only when you insteigate a query by clicking on the Search button.

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