Diablo 3: How to Profit from the Auction House

In Diablo 3 for the PC, the Auction House is a great new feature. It’s not just great because you can buy and sell your equipment legitimately now, but also because you can profit from other people’s laziness and blunders.

In its current state the Auction House is not the easiest thing to use in terms of finding average market prices for items. What this leads to is people giving up, and just listing items at random prices. You can use this as a HUGE advantage for yourself, not only for getting cheap equipment for your characters, but also for making a lot more gold with very little effort, and possibly making real money when the real currency Auction House opens up.

In order to make this work though, you need to keep a keen eye on the stats that are popular that people are buying up at the time.

Here are some stats that are selling extremely well right now:

Intelligence – Wizards are super popular right now, partly because they’re somewhat OP in Inferno difficulty. Popular class means more playing, which means more gear buyers.

Dexterity – The Demon Hunter class is fairly popular right now as well, since ranged classes are currently having the most success in Inferno difficulty.

Experience – Experience gear means leveling up faster, and people will always love leveling up faster. This stat will probably always in demand, since max level characters will be leveling up alts as well, and they may be willing to spend more money on them as well to buff them up.

Magic Find – Who doesn’t like having a better chance to find magic items? This stat will probably always be somewhat popular, but there’s a lot of it out there right now so it’s flooded the market lately making prices drop.

Gold Find – Extremely hot right now for Diablo 3 gold farming. Dexterity + Gold Find or Intelligence + Gold Find of all level ranges are practically flying off the shelves.

How To Find The Cheap Stuff

Now that you know what to look for, you now move on to finding the cheap stuff listed in the Auction House.

It’s all about filtering your results properly, so you don’t have a million pages to go through before you get to the bottom. Currently, you can only see 46 pages of results, so if you sort by price with too broad of a range, you won’t see everything.

What you want to do is apply several filters when searching. Narrow it down by level range, pick specific armor or weapon types, a specific rarity, and most important of all, make sure to pick the popular stats over any other.

For example, search for a rare helmet, level 18 to 20, with experience and intelligence. Once you get the results, immediately sort by Buyout price, and click it again to change it to sort from high to low. Scroll through the pages until you get to the bottom of the Buyout prices, where it starts listing N/A for people that only set Bid prices. This is where you can find some good deals.

Look for stats that are much higher than others that seem out of place. I’ve found a lot of great deals this way, finding items that should have been listed for thousands more than what I bought them for.

Some people are lazy, and won’t do research before posting their items, so they’ll price them way below the going price. Use this to your advantage to snag it and sell it for a profit.

Another tip is to look for people that neglected to put in a Buyout price, and also put a really cheap bid price. Sometimes if you get lucky you can find these with just a few hours or minutes left and place a decent bid to get it dirt cheap.

How to Sell Properly

When experienced players buy stuff they want, they search for the specific stats they want. Before you list an item, make sure to search for items as similar as possible.

Always search for items with the exact same level requirements, so if the level requirement for your item is 53, then search for only level 53 items to compare.

Search for the best stats on the item, and leave out the fluff. I play a Demon Hunter, so when I search I’m always using all of the filters looking for Dexterity + Experience + Attack Speed, or Dexterity + Gold Find + Pickup Radius. If people do this when they’re buying, you need to do this when you’re selling to figure out what your competition is.

If an item has a ton of one primary stat, and a little of another primary stat, then leave the smaller one off. For example, if you have a piece of armor with a lot of dexterity and just a little intelligence, then only filter by intelligence because Wizards won’t care about that item.

Once you narrow your search down, sort by Buyout price and look near the bottom. Ignore the dumb asses that list their items at max price, because I guarantee you they’re not selling them unless they have ridiculous stats. What you want to look for is items with around the same vendor price as yours, which is a general indicator of the stats on the piece. Junk stats are thrown in there too though, so keep that in mind. Look for the most comparable piece on the market, and undercut them by a bit.

Also keep an eye out for pieces that look way too cheap, and buy them if you think you can flip them for a profit. This is especially true for hot items like Gold Find. A lot of people don’t realize how popular Gold Find items are right now, and may list them dirt cheap, so you can flip them for a really nice profit.