Young auctioneers set for Ekka

Australian Livestock & Property Agents Association (ALPA) hosted 12 hopefuls at a two-day coaching school and chief executive officer Andy Madigan said it was exciting to have two young ladies in the running for the first time in history. 

“We will be keen to watch their progress as up and coming auctioneers in the future,” he said.

The finalists selected to compete in the ALPA Young Auctioneers Competition at the Brisbane Exhibition were Andrew Carcary (GDL Blackall), William Loudon (GDL Miles), Nicholas Malone (Queensland Rural Charters Towers), Lincoln McKinlay (TopX Roma), Anthony O'Dwyer (GDL Dalby), Alexander Riley (Ray White Rural Roma), Nick Shorten (GDL Roma), Jake Smith (Landmark Roma) and Bryton Virgo (Landmark Emerald). 

A total of 22 auctioneers attended the school with many keen to take an opportunity to work with a speech therapist to hone their skills. 

“It’s extremely important that we have professional speech therapists,” Mr Madigan said. 

“There’s a lot of older auctioneers who just can’t sell for longer periods of time anymore because they never had the training with speech therapists when they were starting off.”

Victorian speech therapist Eliza Galvin traveled to the school and said it was vital that auctioneers could continue to use their voices for a long time. 

“Without their voice, they don’t have a job,” she said.  

“So being professional voice users they rely on their voice for their income so it’s paramount, not just as an auctioneer but also as an agent.”

“For the guys that go on to the competition process they need more tools like the body language and the facial expressions and they learn to sort of fine-tune their auctioneering skills to become more of a performance.”

- Additional reporting: Penelope Arthur