Heritage Auction Galleries, the world’s third largest auction, has announced that their count of registered bidder-members in their online community at HA.com has now reached and surpassed 400,000 collectors.”Heritage first began registering bidder-members in February of 1999,” calculated Heritage Co-Chairman Jim Halperin. “Some five years later, at the end of 2003, we were thrilled to have reached the level of 100,000 registered bidder-members. Two years later, at the end of 2005, we reached the 200,000 registered bidder-members mark. A little more than a year later, we passed 300,000 registered bidder-members, and now, after a similar short period, our HA.com collector community has more than 400,000 members. This is an incredibly exciting time for the auction business, and the wide array of material we bring to our bidders makes the entire market more vibrant.”

“We attribute our steady, impressive growth to both the services and items we offer on the HA.com website,” added Michael Weems, Heritage’s Vice President of eCommerce. “Our accelerated growth can be attributed to the high quality items we offer, a wide range of free valuation information with every lot (including over 2 million previous prices realized records in our Permanent Auction Archives), a commitment to technological innovation, and our reputation for dealing with integrity. Applying these principles to new areas of collectibles and art has fueled our growth over the past decade, as well as creating many new opportunities and collecting interests for our clients.”