THE former home of tragic suicide victim Jason Smurfit was sold for €1.41m at a crowded auction room yesterday.
The auction attracted plenty of interest, eventually selling for €310,000 more than the guide price. Five separate bidders got involved in the quickfire auction held in the plush surrounds of the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, Killiney, in leafy [...]

Search engine Google is expected to launch an online payment service today that will undercut the charges of established providers such as Ebay’s PayPal in enabling transactions over the web.
Google Checkout will speed the purchase process for consumers and make it easier for advertisers to monitor and complete sales.

The Irish version of eBay, the auction website, is to add Skype voice-calling features onto its website next month in a move the company said would make it easier for buyers and sellers to communicate with each other.
The new service lets sellers include free voice calls over the internet and instant messaging to their listings. [...]

Two properties owned by Queen’s University in Belfast have been sold at public auction for a total of £2.5m.
The first to go under the gavel was an end-of-terrace property at 14-16 Upper Crescent, off University Road. Bidding started at £700,000; however, it quickly soared until a final knock-down of £1.66m.
Consisting of three interconnecting, listed buildings, [...]

A website that has been the scourge of Irish supermarkets for more than two years, monitoring their prices and exposing dubious practices on behalf of shoppers.
Shoppingbill.com, a website that offers consumers free and independent advice, is being sold by its creators due to a lack of resources.
The site is being auctioned on Ebay.ie and the [...]

The Irish Auctioneers & Valuers Institute represents over 1,550 real estate agents and auctioneers in Ireland. Over 85% of property transactions in Ireland are conducted by an IAVI member.
This portal contains Ireland’s only comprehensive aggregated listing of property and real estate that is restricted to qualified Members of IAVI. The public, in using the site, [...]

UK Auction Info
Just days ahead of the 2006 Open Golf Championship, to be held at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake next month, 40 out of 500 lots in Bonhams’ next Golfing Memorabilia Sale will relate to the Club and its famous players. The auction will be held on 17 July 2006 at Bonhams’ [...]

UK Auction Info
Blue Peter will introduce ID cards for badge-winners to stop the pins being traded on eBay.
The BBC children’s show wants to stop people ‘defrauding the system’ of badges, which grants free admission to 200 British attractions.
Bosses found parents wanting to save money on family outings were snapping up second-hand pins and they suspended [...]

Irish Independent
ONLINE shopping is proving to be a headache for Irish consumers with a majority of complaints to the European Consumer Centre in Dublin last year to do with web traders.
A new report from the ECC office shows that there was a four-fold rise in the number of complaints from online shoppers.
Most of the complaints [...]

UK Auction Info
A BID battle for control of the UK’s biggest ports operator looks likely to intensify this week with a new offer which is worth almost £2.7bn.
Britannia Ports – a consortium led by Australian bank Macquarie – is reportedly preparing to up the stakes by trumping the agreed offer made last week by Goldman [...]

UK Auction Info
Due to scientific uncertainty over a BSE-type disease affecting sheep and goats, the UK’s food regulator is expected to issue today further precautionary advice about eating mutton and to propose EU-wide labelling rules for products containing the meats.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is expected to issue a reworded advice about the issue after [...]

Dublin auction house James Adams is putting works by artist Mark O’Neill under the hammer in their St Stephen’s Green salesrooms on June 28 at 7pm.
The selling exhibition, which starts on Monday, and will run until the auction day, is also viewable at www.adams.ie.
Comprising 55 previously unseen paintings by Mark O’Neill, painted in the last [...]

UK Auction Info
Police running Scotland’s knife amnesty were amazed when a worried pensioner handed them his collection of more than 500 letter openers.
The man had spent more than 40 years building the massive hoard.
But he gave it all up because he feared crooks would break into his home, steal the openers and use them as [...]

UK Auction Info
The success of two-year-old breeze-up (two-year-old in training) sales in Britain has prompted Irish sales company Goffs to enter the market there for the first time.Goffs made the announcement at a 150-strong party at Home House, London, on Tuesday, June 13 co-hosted by Goffs and Bernard McNamara, owner of the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, [...]

Sligo Weekender
WHILE many farmers struggle to get a realistic financial return from their farms, the price of farm land continues to rise.
A national survey of farm sales published in the past week showed that the price of what would be considered agricultural land rose by an average of E7,000 an acre in the first six [...]