Let me start at the end: we didn’t get it. A co-worker and I were bidding on a local powered plane that came up for auction from a bankruptcy case. We did all our homework, had it pre-buy inspected and were ready to bid with a hard ceiling in mind. The auction started at 10am in the morning and went on until the late afternoon. Around 2:30p said airplane came up. The auctioneer tried to find the bottom by asking bids starting at $75k. He found a taker at $25k and the bidding started from there. Unfortunately that was only a couple of thousand bucks away from our predetermined max bid. The plane finally sold for $37.5k – not bad, but not good enough for what we wanted to do. It was intended to be a fun investment to be flipped for profit after some time.  So we didn’t get it. It was a lot of excitement for no money spent. Over the day, they auctioned off a total of ~400 items. So not a whole lot of time on each item…

There were boats, cars, trucks, trailers, trailer homes, farm equipment, tools, jewlery – you name it.

If you ever get a chance to visit a live auction, I highly recommend it. There was lots of demand and prices paid were often on par or even slightly higher for what I would suspect you could buy the item used for.