ABOVE: A buyer inspects items at a fundraiser auction for the Queen Emma Summer Palace on Oahu and Hulihee Palace on Hawaii Island.
One of the first official auctions Alicia and David Brandt conducted, in 2013, was for the former possessions of billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto, who'd bought up luxury properties in the exclusive Kahala neighborhood, then got indicted for tax evasion and had to sell them off. The auction had the feel of a festival, complete with a food truck and portable toilets set up on a tennis court attached to one of the Kahala Avenue mansions Kawamoto once owned. About a thousand gawkers, bidders and even then-mayor Kirk Caldwell attended the day-long auction, snapping up about six hundred items, including life-size stone lion statues, brass-cast tigers, Buddha figures, mermaid sculptures and Versace pillows—"high-end, assembly-line kitsch," said an art history professor at the time. The only two items no one wanted: a broken vase and a garage closet with nails and jumper cables.
The Brandts' deal with the former belongings of some of Hawaii's wealthiest—and most eccentric—individuals. Usually when they're dead or in financial trouble. They're also tasked with selling off the remains of Hawaii's beloved institutions and landmarks, including Love's Bakery, The Willows, Aloha Stadium. And in between all that are their auctions for forklifts and backhoes, jewelry from the Honolulu Police Department's evidence room and HPD surplus holsters, a dog head costume from a closed pet store and live koi from St. Francis School. As the owners of Oahu Auctions, which has held about a thousand auctions since the Brandts started the business in 2008, it's unlikely you will find anyone else selling such diverse lots.
"You name it, we've probably sold it, and I can talk about anything just enough to sound interesting," David Brandt says. "You wanna talk medical equipment, you wanna talk heavy equipment, you want to talk farm equipment, you wanna talk wine? You want to talk vintage collectibles, Hawaiiana? I can hold my own in a bar." The work, he says, suits his short attention span. "You have to figure out how to market so many different types of commodities. You have to learn who might be interested in surplus stadium seats. You have to have that curiosity to figure out what makes something desirable." Some things are easy, like a forklift or tractor: "You can say, OK, I can see why somebody would want this, they're gonna unload boxes in their warehouse, or they're going to plow a field." But the less practical items are difficult "because it's not apparent why that would be valuable to somebody."
David Brandt enjoys the peripatetic nature of his work as the owner of Oahu Auctions, the largest auction house in Hawaii. Brandt takes inventory of an exclusive Oahu club that closed in 2020 and turned to Oahu Auctions to sell its holdings. "It's neat to come in here and put yourself in this world for a little while," says Brandt, "and then when you get tired of it, you're off to the next thing."
Among the less practical: meteorites from the late attorney Gary Galiher, a life-size NFL referee sculpture and fifteen-foot shark and whale sculptures from the closure of Jimmy Buffet's restaurant in 2016. The strangest thing he's ever sold? A bullet reportedly extracted from the body of a royalist who fought against the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom more than a century ago, complete with a doctor's note of the bullet's provenance. It sold for a little over $500 to a collector on Maui.
Deep in the bowels of Ala Moana Center, Brandt and I are in the wine cellar of an exclusive, erstwhile "private society" club. Brandt and his staff have cataloged more than 1,500 bottles of wine, including a 1969 Chateau Margaux, for an online auction. When I visited the club's restaurant prior to its opening ten years ago, its Japanese developer, Takeshi Sekiguchi, told me, "It doesn't matter how much it costs—if it's $10 million or $100 million. This restaurant is to be the best in the world." When it opened, the space—a dark cavern lined with custom-made imported bricks—felt like a tomb. It feels even more so now; since closing in 2020 it's been virtually sealed off during litigation between Ala Moana Center and Shirokiya, which owned the club. The bar is still stocked with opened liquor bottles, while half-empty bottles of wine remain in the dispenser as if waiting to be poured for guests that evening. "When these situations happen, it's kind of fast," Brandt says. "It's what we're used to when people close down a business. They just leave everything." Brandt is reluctant to talk in detail about this auction because of its messy court battle. But it's not surprising: Death and endings are messy, especially when money's involved.
For the next round of the club auction—which Brandt has carefully avoided naming in the listing, referring to it as an "exclusive Ala Moana Center dining venue"—Brandt's staff has pulled out all the servingware and are photographing the pieces individually, from custom ceramics to Tiffany's teapots. Next will be all the kitchen equipment, including a PolyScience Anti-Griddle Flash Freezer, which was all the rage about a decade ago for the way it worked like a stove, but one that froze rather than heated. It's being photographed from all four sides, to be accompanied by the description "Needs repair. Does not power on. Power switch appears broken. Other unknown deficiencies may exist." It's strange to see a fantasy being disassembled so dispassionately and sold for parts.
“I’ve always been interested in the used market,” Brandt says, ever since he was a child and bought an almost-new fishing reel for a third the price of a new one at a garage sale.
Brandt often gets to know people and businesses through what they leave behind. I ask whether he ever gets sentimental selling off their items. He says it's sad to see St. Francis School, a Catholic private school in Manoa founded in 1924, and Hawaii's iconic Love's Bakery founded in 1851, gone. But where I see endings, he sees beginnings. St. Francis' bus went to Saint Louis School, Brandt says, and its sporting equipment to other, smaller private schools. "And when you see people come and pick up this equipment, stainless tables or refrigeration or slicers, see them getting a new beginning, it's a great feeling to sell to a mom-and-pop startup," he says. "It's kind of funny—I was walking by Whole Foods in Kahala, and they had this thing on the window of all these local businesses they supported. And every single one of those people I knew from buying stuff from us at auctions: a coffee company, a juice company, an ice cream company, farmers. It's the ultimate reutilization and recycling."
Brandt, who in 2017 auctioned off the jewelry of the late Princess Regina Kawananakoa, a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, once used to dig through the blue bins of a Goodwill surplus store in Kalihi looking for items to sell on eBay. "They would have these trucks loaded with big plastic bins full of electronics or collectibles or clothes or cameras. They would slide these bins off of the truck, and we were just like animals, pawing through these bins," Brandt remembers. "There would be this group of swap meet sellers, and we developed this hui [group]. There was Debbie, who would buy only sheets. There was Ken, who would repair only VCRs. A guy who would do Hawaiiana. That's how I started."
He's long had an entrepreneurial streak. When he was 22, he left his life in the Catalina Islands, crewing a rescue boat for the county sheriff's search and rescue team, to partner in an offroading vehicle rental company on Lanai, just as the island's economy was transitioning from pineapples to tourism. But the roads were so rugged that the company's Land Rovers were constantly breaking down, requiring the vehicles to be shipped to Oahu to be repaired. The business lasted two years. He and his wife, Alicia, whom he met on Lanai, moved to Oahu.
Oahu Auctions sells anything and everything: state vehicles, pieces of Aloha Stadium, flour sacks from Love’s Bakery and jewelry from Queen Emma’s Summer Palace.
In the late '90s he'd sift through the wares at the Kam Swap Meet, "buying old cameras and anything that people here weren't interested in. I would drive home and put stuff on eBay and sometimes make $3,000 to $5,000 a day for a couple hours' worth of work." Back before we had the Internet in our pocket, he relied on instinct to determine what was worth buying. "I started going from five to ten items a week to one hundred items a week and then a hundred items a day." He bought a house and turned its attached 1,800-square-foot cottage into an office and warehouse for his growing eBay business.
He started buying items at auctions and reselling them—"a lot of people specialize in only one thing, but for me, I didn't care what it was," as long as he thought he could sell it for three times what he paid—and heard from bankruptcy attorneys and trustees about a demand for auction services. He got his auction license and launched Oahu Auctions. The Jimmy Buffet's auction in 2016 was the last in-person one the Brandts held—they moved the bidding online, where collusion among bidders is less likely, and are less susceptible to events keeping people from reaching the auctions, like tsunami warnings or parades in Waikiki or pandemics.
Today, Oahu Auctions has a 5,400-square-foot warehouse at Dole Cannery and a commercial yard at Barbers Point for vehicles and large equipment. Not specializing is still Brandt's specialty. In the week that we talk, in addition to handling Vintage Cave, Brandt is also preparing to auction tools from a welding company, equipment from an underwater robotics competition sponsored by the US Navy and koa wood furniture for a Queen Emma Palace fundraiser. Oahu Auctions has managed items from Four Seasons Lanai as it switched out its decor, the Old Spaghetti Factory when it moved, a dental lab, a laser eye center, a Waikiki nightclub and a fertility clinic. And it has auctioned the same items more than once, including a red 1950 "Hilo sampan" bus (an open-air jeepney once used as public transport in Hilo), sold twice over after its successive owners died; and a Toyota forklift, which sold at auction during the pandemic for twice the price its previous owner paid, also at auction, five years earlier. "That's what keeps this interesting," Brandt says. "That you really never know what things are gonna go for."
A woman who purchased forty-nine bottles of wine at the Vintage Cave auction arrives at Oahu Auctions' office at Dole Cannery later in the week to collect another item she won in a different auction—the "Everything Goes" auction—a handbag made out of a metal Hawaii license plate rolled into a cylinder. The first thing she ever bought through Oahu Auctions was a pair of purple earrings with diamonds from a 2022 HPD evidence room auction, selling off things that the police confiscated (lots of bolt cutters and other tools of the criminal trades) or that have gone unclaimed from their lost-and-found. Since then she's bid in thirty-eight auctions, winning in twenty-four, and prefers to remain anonymous because her husband doesn't know about it. "It's my money, it's not his money," she says. "He'd say, 'What do you need all this kind of stuff for? It's junk.' It's not junk!"
The Honolulu Police Department’s evidence room auction is one of Oahu Auctions’ most popular events, where you can bid on everything from bikes to bolt cutters (natch). (ABOVE) An assortment of items at Oahu Auctions’ warehouse in Dole Cannery.
The Brandts' auctions can veer from the outlandish to utilitarian, and in the case of the Everything Goes one, all in a single catalog. Among the 249 items: surplus HPD holsters (bundled in boxes of at least fifty-five), stuffed manta rays (box of ten), Honolulu City and County brass dog tags (two boxes of about two thousand pieces each), one size-small Port Authority shirt packaged in a Love's Bakery Country Hearth plastic bread bag, one dog head mask, one dental X-ray machine, one brand-new band saw. "It's just leftovers from different auctions," Brandt says, "or sometimes we have a large quantity of something that we miscount, or sometimes people will bring us stuff and say, 'I've got three or four boxes of this. Just put it in an auction when you can.' Or sometimes the lots people win are so large that they'll leave some of it behind." Rather than throw it away, Brandt offers up this mixed-bag auction about every six months. Everything does indeed go.
It's amazing what sells. Aside from business owners acquiring practical items like speed racks and ovens and tractors, there are also the entrepreneurial people who buy old photographs from Aloha Stadium to market at their sports memorabilia store, those who buy boxes of lost and found clothes to vend at the swap meet, sellers who hope to resell all those HPD holsters. And there are the buyers of nostalgia. Guy Matsunaga says the best thing he ever bought from Oahu Auctions, which has included dinner plates from Alan Wong's restaurant and an elliptical from the Honolulu Club (both of which closed during the pandemic), is the big hand with the finger pointing to the bathroom at the erstwhile Ward Warehouse mall. He has it mounted on his living room wall. "I spent a ridiculous amount on it," he says. "But it was Ward Warehouse! I wanted it for the history." Both a piece of Hawaii history from a building now replaced by a luxury high-rise condo and of personal history—he got one of his dogs at the pet shop beneath Kincaid's. In the anonymous world of the internet, Matsunaga has come to trust Oahu Auctions, with its listings accompanied by multiple detailed, almost clinical photos and disclosures. Contrast that with his dealings with another seller who "lied on the website" about a car, and Matsunaga, a lawyer, sued him.
Chloe Hartwell peruses Oahu Auctions' listings occasionally and has purchased a Hawaiian quilt, antique Japanese beer mugs and a set of juice glasses. "I love exploring estates," she says. "It always feels a bit voyeuristic to see a person's belongings photographed in bright light and lined up on a website, but it's fascinating to see the things people choose over a lifetime."
She first heard about Oahu Auctions through the Love's Bakery auction. "Everyone had been so shocked about them closing," she remembers. "It's not practical to be nostalgic about everything, but we lost so many institutions during the pandemic that it felt like there was a collective desire to want to save or keep something tangible." I find the same feeling surfacing as I scroll through pages and pages of Oahu Auctions' past sales, as if looking into Hawaii's collective attic to see what's been left behind, what has outlasted a business or person, what's no longer of use in one life but will be, perhaps, in another.
