On behalf of the planning committee, feedback received. I'm on the elder board at the church, so I helped coordinate the facility. One of our other club members did detailed scale drawings, to try to plan out all the space and where everything was going to go. We knew we were going to be a little tight in the impound area. We hoped that having a longer lineup in the "on-deck" area would help give buyers more of an opportunity to view items before they went up for bid. We'll explore a couple other options to help out with the impound situation next year.
On the parking situation, that was my fault. My thought process was, we have more people there for church on Sunday morning and still have plenty of parking, so it won't be a problem. What I forgot was that on Sundays, people come with anywhere from 2 to 6 people in a car, whereas for the auction, they are almost all coming one to a car (or an F-350 dually, or an F-350 pulling a trailer).[
] I didn't think about it until about 10:00 when I heard someone mention that there was no place to park, so then we started asking club members to move to the community college across the street. We probably had 35-40 cars that were club members. Next year, we will plan on having club members park off-site and shuttle over and we shouldn't have a problem.
There's a few other things we picked up on that we'll try to work out, but overall for us putting on the auction, it was a huge improvement. Besides the space improvement, the biggest keys for us internally are that we now have access to the auction site from basically anytime Friday up until anytime Saturday evening and we have full use of the facility, including sound and video. We came in Friday night and literally had everything set up so we pretty much just had to unlock on Sat. At our old location, we couldn't get in until about 6:30 or 7 on Sat. morning, so we had to scramble to get everything set up. Meanwhile, sellers were gathering by 7 to start checking in planes and register as bidders. We would have to put them off until close to 8 while we set up and there would end up being a big backlog. This year club members showed up a little before 7 and we were already taking sellers' planes by a little after 7. By 7:30 I was registering bidders and we didn't have any backups.
It was also much nicer at the end of the day. Our old hosts have a 5:00 mass and, naturally, wanted us out before then. Although we would try to move items across the block as quickly as possible, we were scrambling to get everything done and cleaned up and out of there. We actually finished selling this year around 3:30, but we would have been able to stay as long as necessary (within reason).
Thanks for the feedback and hope to see you all next year. I wish I had more chance to chat with bidders this year, but as "church liaison", I ended up spending a lot more time running around trying to put out small fires (like fixing toilets and moving cars).