At the end of last month's article I introduced a regional results table and said that I would go through the relevance of the columns this month. Please note that I have changed the column order of the table for reasons that will become apparent.

If you're going to buy at auction either on a one-off or regular basis, you simply can't have too much information on which to base your decisions and once again the Essential Information Group (EIG) provide unique information as you will see.

Firstly, some clarification: I am going to refer to 'EIG' a number of times throughout this series of articles, but don't want to give the impression that my articles are in any way an advertorial promotion for EIG. It is simply that in my opinion they are the best at what they do and they provide me and many highly experienced auction buyers with valuable unique data for my research, so 'enough said'.

The table is a spread sheet I designed from base figures obtained from EIG, the calculations and percentages are my own, because I wanted to see what was happening on a region by region basis, to see how the regions differed and by recording these figures every month/quarter I could see whether there were changes or trends of consequence across the regions. I can tell you that there are not, other than hammer (sold) prices and percentages both of which have steadily increased since the Great Recession. If you want to keep abreast of this information then EIG produce a monthly e-newsletter including a brief review of these results.