Partner Article

Online auction sells off items from Rio Olympics

Over 1.3 million items of furniture from the Olympic Village were up for grabs last month through a series of online auctions organised by B-Stock Solutions (on behalf of Olympic Sponsor RGS events, the Official Furniture and Fixtures Project Manager of the Games). Hundreds of 40-foot containers of furniture and accessories are now being prepared for shipping to their new owners and will be dispatched in just a few weeks time.

It’s hard to comprehend just how big The Olympic Village actually is but to give you some idea, it’s made up of 31 buildings, each with 17 floors and 3,604 apartments. Around 18,000 people stayed in the Village during the Games, including athletes, trainers, coaches and medical staff. Given its size, it’s no surprise that the inventory from the mile-long village included 20,000 beds, 135,000 chairs, 42,000 tables, 10,000 wardrobes, tens of thousands of safes, umbrellas and much more!

What makes this particular Olympics event so unique is that for the first time ever, the furniture has been sold through business-to-business online auctions. These auctions were organised by B-Stock Solutions on behalf of RGS events, who are the company responsible for procuring and finishing all of the athlete apartments.

The online auctions ran from June right through to the end of August on the B-Stock Events marketplace (https://events.bstock.com/). With over 90% of the stock successfully sold, containers of items are set to be shipped out to just under a dozen countries including the US, Spain, Canada, Ghana, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

The lucky winners of the stock include party rental companies, furniture resale companies, school furniture vendors, closeout/bargain stores, janitorial companies, churches, trading companies, and wholesalers.

The most registrations to bid on the items came from US companies, with UK in second place and Brazil in third. In total however, there were registrations from companies in over 36 countries, all keen to grab their very own piece of the Rio Olympics.

Howard Rosenberg, CEO of B-Stock Solutions said:

“Historically RGS events have handled the reselling of event stock themselves, but that process takes up a huge amount of time, effort and money, particularly when you consider just how much stock there is to shift from an event like the Rio Olympics. So this year, we offered them a different solution which involved building them a specific auction website to help sell their stock quickly, effectively and for the best possible price. By opening up the stock to a global audience, we were also able to help RGS events to recover the maximum returns on the stock due to the unprecedented demand for these items at auction.

We’re thrilled with how successful these auctions were and look forward to seeing these memories of the Rio Olympics appear at events and venues across the globe in the coming months.“

As a final thought, you might be wondering what the most popular item was? Well, we can reveal that it was in fact the white folding chairs that the athletes sat on while waiting to compete. So next time you are at an event, perhaps you’ll sharing the same seat as an Olympic medal winner!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Media Jems PR .