My Office

At first glance you would not think the picture above is an office but in fact it was. My personal office was 20x20 in our office building.
The large closing desk was the one used by president Lincoln in his office at the Willard Hotel his balcony faced Pennsylvania avenue that he spoke from on many occasions. The hardwood floor and arm wall came from the Gibson hotel in Cincinnati. The floor was taken up and all the nails had to be removed and laid down by liquid cement on the concrete. It was old, discolored, chipped, and weather beaten. The first thing the carpenter wanted to do was sand the floors down to make them look new. "That my friend is the exact opposite of what I want its appearance to be" I said. It’s antique you know? The chandelier was from the Commodore, I especially liked the barber chair with the telephone, I had my haircut there most frequently.
The paneling and doors all came from different hotels throughout the building and especially the paneling in my office (not seen in photo) most of it came from the NCR administrative building in Dayton Ohio, Charles Patterson’s office.

Of course during the demolition the place was a shamble but every time NCL’s president would come to check his office space NCL’s crew would come in and clean a beautiful path through the building and into his office (I guess it was because he was president of the company) it seemed like a waste of a bunch of time and money to me because it wouldn’t stay clean very long.

I’ll tell you more in my book about the most unusual things done to the other offices in common areas with some real elaborate pictures, would you be interested?

Clem D. Long

Auctioneer and Hotel Liquidator

Founder and former C.O.B. of National Content Liquidators

Third generation of Auctioneers

The Media

The beautiful part of liquidating hotels is the news worthiness to the media.
Every time we would have a hotel sale the news media would show up even to the extent that we would expect a gathering large enough to set up a conference room or cocktail bar passing out pieces of memorabilia to the reporters. It turned into a great marketing tool that spread the word of our sale together with putting it into a portfolio when we would be working with future clients. I chose the following news article for your review (Click to enlarge).

Our company owned a hearse and an ambulance that we would drive to the hotel with materials and personnel stopping at key locations that we notified the news media we would be at hoping they would be there to greet us.

If the hotel was being razed we would use the hearse to symbolize the death of the hotel and if it was being refurbished we would take the ambulance to symbolize the hotel was hurt and was to be brought back to health.

To our surprise the media did show up at stops we made driving to the hotel and were more interested in the hearse and ambulance than the hotel itself. This was a lot of fun especially when we finally arrived at the hotel, being greeted by anxious people that read the prior articles for more information.

While conducting the sale we used the hearse to run around town, barhop and dine. When our company was in town everybody knew it and my job as C.O.B. was marketing and this was just a simple marketing tool, I’ll get further into that as the book progresses. Let me know what you would think about a book that goes more into this kind of stuff.

Clem D. Long

Auctioneer and Hotel Liquidator

Founder and former C.O.B. of National Content Liquidators

Third generation of Auctioneers

Commodore

Who grows the biggest apples in the country?

PILLOWS. Here we have a 2000 room hotel, which means 4000 beds, which means 8000 pillows, which is the best way to sell these pillows? In one lot? In lots? Or one at a time for 5 dollars each. Economics again.

We had so many people standing in line around the block that the police put up horse barricades and kept them in line riding their real horses, blocked off the street so people could get their trucks in and loaded. New York was just as anxious to something positive happening to their city and by not having the hotel close.

We had so many dedicated people determined to get into the hotel and buy something that we went over our 6pm closing time and at 8:30 our biggest problem was our revolving door entrance. People would force themselves into the revolving doors while we were trying to close the building which prevented us from closing as people would continuously trap themselves in the door. Finally we had to get the police to barricade the front entrance off.

Only problem was we had 1000's of people in the hotel that deserved to be served so our cashiers didn't get done working until midnight, and then 2 o'clock settling up the books. By the time we got everyone out the building it was 4am only to be up again at 8am to start the sale all over again at 9am. This went on for 10 days. Nothing is more frightening than too many people other than having too many people inside a building.

More to come...

I'm interested in writing a book on this subject matter, How interesting do you find it?

Clem D. Long Auctioneer and Hotel Liquidator Founder and former C.O.B. of National Content Liquidators Third Generation of Auctioneers

Adolphus

We were in the Adolphus hotel with a demoliton crew that was staging the implosion of the complete city block across the street. One of my guys was asked to push the plunger to detonate the explosion which delighted him. Some of the buildings across the street were the baker hotel, an office building, a bank building, etc. that all went down in a blaze of glory.

While casually walking through the Adolphus I notice the dust on the philodendrons, the shoddy carpet and dirty chandeliers. I said to my crew that “believe it or not we’ll be back at the Adolphus to do a liquidation before you know it”. Sure enough it wasn’t too long before we were liquidating its contents and what a sale it was.

Many of the hotel liquidations were contracted through demolition companies that were bidding to get the jobs.

I encouraged them to use our company NCL (National Content Liquidators) to let them know how much we can get out of the contents so they could use my guaranteed number when determining how much it cost to raise the building. There was a case in St. Louis that I guaranteed the demolition company 500,000 dollars for the contents and they used that number and bought the whole real estate for 500,000 dollars and sold it for several million before a liquidation sale was complete.

In those days hotel management companies didn’t want to own real estate because it was a constant liability that affected their cash flow. Also in those days I didn’t have the cash or guts to take the chance on buying a vacant building that might sit empty for years. Win some, lose some.


Clem D. LongAuctioneer and Hotel LiquidatorFounder and former C.O.B. of National Content LiquidatorsThird generation of Auctioneers

Beware the Penalty Clause

Beware the penalty clause. There was a penalty clause when we liquidated the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, GA a little over 30 years ago that stated we would have 30 days to conduct our sale and we had to be out before 12pm on exactly the 30th day. The architect, whom had designed the renaissance buildings in Detroit, was the person responsible for imposing the penalty clause and no matter how much bargaining we did he would never allow us to extend the sale. We later found out his reasoning for not granting us an extension was the sale would delay construction and any delay in construction would mean a delay in being able to have a full occupancy which would bring in more profit for the hotel than the sale of the rest of the furniture.
Being we had to be out the hotel when the 30th day came we had already decided we were going to sell any furniture we were unable to sell out in front of the hotel on the sidewalk, this definitely didn’t go as smoothly as planned. The day we had to move out all of the furniture the fire alarm rang for a fire drill we weren’t informed of while we were moving out the furniture. This wasn’t any ordinary fire drill either, this was a full drill conducted by the fire department. The firefighters were required to perform all the actions they would be required to do during a real fire in a building of this size. There were firemen on the fire escapes, fire men checking all the rooms it was a really thorough job. Getting all the furniture outside to the front sidewalk during a fire drill was chaotic enough but just imagine what it was like outside of the hotel. The amount of people outside due to the fire alarm caused massive confusion. Buyers couldn’t even tell who the sales people were and some even attempted to by some of the furniture from strangers by offering their money to people who were just walking the strip. In the end the sale was profitable so maybe it was a good thing I didn’t notice the penalty clause as otherwise I wouldn’t have signed the contract but overlooking the penalty clause is definitely something I wouldn’t recommend you do at home, the results can be disastrous.

If you would be interested in a book with anecdotes such as these let me know in a comment, I would appreciate it. The stories published here are still works in progress so they may be a little rough around the edges but I feel they should allow you to get a good feel of what the content of the book would be.

Clem D. Long
Auctioneer and Hotel Liquidator
Founder and former C.O.B. of National Content Liquidators
Third generation of Auctioneers

I Love Old Hotel Stuff

Dear New Blogger Friends,
I Love Old Hotel Stuff!!!!
My father and I have been collecting old hotel stuff for 50 years and we want to know if anybody else loves this stuff as much as we do...
During the 1960's we started selling the contents of old hotels all over the country and vwala the beginning of our collection. Now we have all this old stuff from the hundreds of hotels we sold out and wonder if anyone else cares about seeing our collection. We have soooo many stories about what happened during our sales and wonder if anybody is interested in hearing some of them. Also, thousands of people bought stuff from us and we wonder if you have any stories from your sale experience.
Dad is 83 now and this is a labor of love for us because we Love Old Hotel Stuff, does anybody out there share our passion?