Will Smith helps Hawke's Bay auctioneer win national title

A Hawke's Bay auctioneer has had a little help from a notorious Hollywood star in taking out a national competition.

Brayden Coldicutt, of Harcourts Real Estate, is proud to have brought the national auctioneering open championship title to Hawke's Bay for the first time.

"Especially being from little old Hawke's Bay, because normally it's someone from Auckland, Christchurch or Wellington, the bigger cities," he said.

Coldicutt won the open division at the 2022 REINZ Championships held in Auckland in late June, beating out 17 other auctioneers from every real estate company around the country.

The win means he can enter next year's premier division, an invitation Coldicutt described as both exciting and scary.

"It's invite-only, and they're normally the people who are fulltime auctioneers," he said.

Most of Coldicutt's work for Harcourts Hawke's Bay is as a sales consultant, but he has been calling auctions for four of the five years he has been a real estate agent.

Calling an auction in a competition is a little bit different to normal though, with judges scoring performances over various criteria.

"They throw a couple of random questions at you to see how you answer and if you answer correctly," Coldicutt said.

"They throw figures at you like $17,500 on top of $1,150,500, and then someone will say half of the last bid, so you've gotta put $8750 on top.

"Obviously stuff like that is a little bit unrealistic, but necessary to decide who wins."

Another key aspect of a competition call is the property description and auctioneers will try to have a theme to keep referring to throughout.

Coldicutt's winning call in the open final was for an apartment called 'GI', so he themed it around the Oscars and Chris Rock's G.I. Jane joke that drew a famous slap from Will Smith at the 2022 Academy Awards.

He peppered in references to awards and the bidders as nominees throughout the call.

Coldicutt said he wouldn't go that far with humour in a normal auction call, given it's a serious situation with a lot of money at stake.

"In real life, making it a little bit lighthearted is good, but mix that with the professionalism and trying to get the best result on the day," Coldicutt said.

"A little bit of humour but not too much.''

He thinks he will keep entering competitions even if he doesn't eventually become a fulltime auctioneer.

Coldicutt says the events promote great camaraderie and act as workshops to hone and update auctioneering skills.