My first auction today

Had a busy day planned today. Auctioneer had 5 locations listed with multiple units. Last night I looked at the update and it was down to two locations. One and hour away from me with one unit and the other 20 min from me with 5 units. We stayed back for the local one. Get there and there are at least 50 people there and only one unit would be going up for auction. The auction started 30 min late (that surprised me since so many of the others were canceled).

Door goes up and it is a 5x10. I see a few boxes, paint cans, toys, cd rack, a couple of misc cheap chairs and an office chair. The unit went for $675.00, hell first bid (called out prior to the start) was $250.00. Me and several others sat their scratching our heads (must have been something none of us seen

Is this to be expected? If so, I can not see anyone making money from doing this.

It is kind of crazy right now.  All these new guys (and I'm not knocking them, we were all new once!) are showing up and some of them have quite a bit of cash and they are bidding things up to stupid levels.  Their bids are not based in any way on the value of items they are seeing in the units.  They are hoping for the magic television score and are really gambling more than they are making a smart investment.  It will probably be like this for a while.  All you can do is keep going and hope to find an auction that for one reason or another not as many people show up too and jump in if you can afford to.  Also, a lot of people are off between Christmas and New Years, so when everybody gets their schedule back to normal, maybe there won't be quite so many bidders.

I went on two separate auction runs today.  Ended up with two units.  Bid on MANY more, but way too many people and prices way too high on most of them.  More bidders than I have ever seen at any auctions, and I'd say a good 90% of them were new to the game.  Hopefully, given time, they will realize that they can't make any money at these elevated prices.  In the meantime, don't quit your day job!

There is a hype out there, and the TV shows are creating it.
I like the hype, don't get me wrong.

The newbies that bid up th units will not be around for long, they maybe will be around for a month or two, and when they see that their investment don't create the  income they wanted, they will run for the hills.

I am my self a newbie in this, but i do it with a long term goal in mind. And i want to make the best deals i can.
That means paying minimum for the units and selling it for the most i can.

My most expesive unit so far was $150.00 my cheapest unit so far was $50.00 and on the one i paid $150.00 for i made $2500.00 on.
The one i paid $50.00 for i made $740.00 on so just be smart.

If there are several units up for auction the same day, let people run out of steam on the early ones, then you hit the last ones with your bids. That way the "tv wannabe" auction hunters will fade away.

Another things is, here in memphis,TN we have on the last 2 auctions had about 30 people showing up, but out of that only 5 to 10 have been bidding.  So there is alot of people just hanging around for thethrill of it.