Why is this money taken by an auctioneer if it has no legal standing whatsoever? It is taken to protect his commission from the vendor, a point which many auctioneers have made to me in the interim. The auctioneer is giving the buyer the impression that he has some sort of right to the purchase, but he has none because it is not a deposit in the legal sense. He is taking money for himself, which he has absolutely no right to hold, and the vendor is not getting the benefit of that money either. In the case in question, it required extreme measures on the part of the vendor to get the auctioneer to hand over the booking deposit to his lawyer. Why should auctioneers give the particularly false impression that booking deposits have some sort of legal standing when that is clearly not the case?