BY JULIAN RICHARDSON

Assistant business co-ordinator

richardsonj@jamaicaobserver.com

THE demand for antique furniture has declined significantly over the last 15 years in Jamaica, forcing auctioneers to gradually pull out from that segment of the collectibles market. The upshot is that antique furniture auctions — once a regular pastime for middle- to upper-income homeowners — have become almost non-existent today.

The underlying issue for the decline is that the people who possess the disposable income today are just not into collecting antiques due to a confluence of reasons, say auctioneers.

“The market was very hot during the 1980s and early 1990s, but it peaked off with the successive financial crises — people sort of backed off,” says William Tavares-Finson, head of auction house DC Tavares & Finson, which no longer auctions antique furniture.

There was also a major shift in the residential housing market from spacious properties to apartments and townhouses with lower square-footage, the auctioneer adds.

“It’s not that many people these days who can fit a 14-seater dining table, a lovely hall table or circular breakfast table because houses have gotten smaller,” Tavares-Finson tells the Business Observer.

Director of CD Alexander Realty, David McNulty, paints a picture of a younger consumer market that simply does not find collecting antiques as fashionable as the generation before them.

“The young people with the money are into chrome and glass, so anything that’s antique, they don’t really have any room for,” says McNulty in a frank manner. “So, I’ll agree that antique auctions are a waste of time… It’s a shift of the middle-income and upper-income guys who are not really into history and what the antiques represent.”

According to McNulty, CD Alexander still occasionally includes some antique furniture items — as mere throw-ins — during its monthly auctions, but they don’t do particularly well.

“We have auctions once a month on a Saturday and it’s not really antiques anymore,” notes McNulty. “It’s general household stuff and things like that, and they get quite well attended because people will buy fridges.

“But if you have antique items in there, which we do from time to time, they just don’t generate any real interest,” he adds.

In addition to the drop-off in demand, Tavares-Finson says that antique furniture auctioning became burdensome over time because of excessive inventory. This, he explains, had put a strain on the operation of auction houses which are dependent on rapid turnover to minimise storage costs — which can be very expensive.

“When you were auctioning antique furniture and stuff, you tend to sell 80 per cent and retain 20 per cent, and then you have another auction and then you sell 80 per cent and retain 20 per cent,” he notes, adding that “by the end of a year or two you have a room full of things that didn’t sell because you kept retaining a certain amount.”