Chances are good that you already know about the Remote AH, and how you can pay $2.99/month to buy, list, cancel auctions and so on. What you may not know is that the $2.99 is there if you plan on actually moving any product. If you just want to check to see what is listed on, say, the Neutral AH, that is free. Just use your smartphone or iPod Touch to download the Mobile Armory app and go to town.

You may be confused, as I was at first. The Remote AH is a part of the Mobile Armory, and it’s ability to see currently listed items on the AH is a part of its free service. If you are like me, you have toons parked in the goblin cities to periodically check for deals on the Neutral AH, or perhaps even cross-faction toons to keep an eye out for arbitrage opportunities. Well, save yourself several log-ins and potential travel time by using the Remote AH (again, for free) to check up on those without ever having to log off your main character.

As for the actual monthly service, I do not think it is quite there yet. While it is fairly easy to search for specific items, you obviously do not have access to the addons you have when playing the game proper, some of which have more powerful searching and filtering tools (to say nothing about their listing powers). The one feature that would send everything over the top though, would be the ability to buy something on the Horde AH, list it on the Neutral AH, and then purchase it yourself for sale on the Alliance AH. Such arbitrage requires you to have a second account on hand to do it solo, but $15 extra a month is a bit steep in my opinion just to make some extra gold. $3 on the other hand? Instant sale.

If you are using the Remote AH and have some feedback to share, please do so in the comments.

If you have a character with a Leatherworking skill of 485 and a character at level 84-85 (it does not need to be the same character), it is quite possible for this scheme to make you thousands of gold in the time it takes you to take three portals. How? First look at the following picture:

Anything jump out at you? For the uninitiated, Savage Leather Scraps are Skinned from lower-level Cataclysm mobs and have no function in of themselves. You can, however, combine five of them at a time into one piece of perfectly good Savage Leather at 425 Leatherworking. In the above picture, we can see that the prices for Savage Leather Scraps are not, in fact, anywhere close to matching their proportionally-priced counterparts. In other words, you can buy five Savage Leather Scraps for ~9.75g, right click them, and sell the result for 35g. I did just that in the opening days of the expansion and ended up with something stupendously large like 14 stacks of Savage Leather without having skinned a single mob.

It would be easy to stop there and be satisfied with our haul, but we can click a few more buttons and increase the profit potential by, oh, let’s say a thousand times. With all of your 28% priced Savage Leather, you can combine them via a 485 Leatherworker into Heavy Savage Leather which increases it’s value quite a bit already (none was selling at 1000g apiece however). With your Heavy Savage Leather neatly stacked in increments of 10, it is time to take the final plunge: Pristine Hide.

Much like Arctic Fur of the Wrath days, Pristine Hide is something that can be Skinned very rarely from level-appropiate mobs… or very commonly purchased from Misty Merriweather (Alliance) or Threm Blackscalp (Horde) out in Twilight Highlands by anyone with 10 pieces of Heavy Savage Leather to rub together. This was actually one of my favorite activities in Wrath, as you could easily come across cheap Borean Leather on the AH and after some Leatherworking alchemy turn around and start selling Leg Armor kits with a 60% margin. In any case, I had neglected this market for quite some time until there was an auspicious bidding war in /Trade that was establishing Pristine Hide’s value in the neighborhood of 1850g.

Yeah, my jaw did the same thing.

Prices have dropped quite a bit since I wrote this article a few days ago, but the underlying scheme still works:

If Scraps x5 < Savage, then Buy.
If Savage x5 < Heavy Savage, then Convert.
If Heavy Savage x10 < Pristine, then Trade.
???
Profit.