"The excitement of being at an auction gets the juices flowing and the competition increases the bids," Rohan said. "But most people do not want to spend 20 hours on an airplane and $10,000 in expenses to come here from abroad. So they can bid online, either with proxy bids at HA.com or in real time using HA.com/live.

"We offered a wonderful Russian painting, 'Pushkin at the Water's Edge,' for sale and three people traveled from Russia to bid on it, but in the end, it was sold for $1.6 million to a man bidding from his sofa in Moscow."

After the Web site attracts people, the way to build business in a particular category is to find an expert to fairly appraise items, which then builds credibility and draws quality items to the auction, says Mark Prendergast, who as the company's director of trusts and estates, advises fiduciaries on how to appraise and liquidate their clients' tangible assets.

Heritage is now the third-largest art and collectibles auction house by sales volume in the world behind Sotheby's and Christie's. According to Compete.com (the Internet equivalent of the Nielsen ratings), HA.com gets more than twice as much traffic as Christies.com and Sothebys.com combined.

Heritage did $675 million in business last year. In addition to Rohan and Halperin, its principals include Paul Minshull, chief operating officer, and Steve Ivy, co-chairman and CEO.

"I think each of us has a genetic disposition for collecting and that helps us understand the mindset of the clients," says Rohan. "We have cutting-edge technology and get 30,000 unique visitors a day to the Web site, where we publish millions of past auction results so that collectors can do research on values before they bid. We have been able to make bidding on collectibles accessible to people worldwide, with no limit on the top or the bottom investment."

Investments in collectibles fluctuate like the rest of the market and people buy and sell for a variety of reasons. When the stock market was at the bottom in 2008 and the first half of 2009, collectibles prices were down 30% or more, on average, because people who needed money were forced to sell their prize possessions and the market was flooded with sellers. Now prices have almost fully rebounded.  

"At the same time during the last couple of years, some big investors who sold equities bought collectibles. Collectibles may go down in value temporarily, but over the long run they usually go up, although there are individual exceptions," says Rohan. "Items that people bought in 2008 were stable or went down for a while, but the investors had hedged themselves and diversified."

"Coins are the most fungible collectibles-the easiest to track prices and easiest of the categories to get in and out of," Halperin adds.

Fashion trends play some role in collecting, exemplified by the record sales in modern art a couple of years ago, which have now leveled off.
During the financial crisis, some who did not have to sell did so anyway.