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PALMER — Ittakesapracticedeartokeepupwiththeauctioneer.

OK, a little slower: It takes a practiced ear to keep up with the auctioneer.

At least that’s what 8-year-old Kayla Tenderella thinks. The Anchorage girl was among hundreds who gathered in the south parking lot of the Alaska State Fairgrounds on Saturday, taking in the spectacle that is the Ritchie Bros. Auction.

She can’t understand the calls of auctioneer John Korrey blasting through a quartet of high-powered speakers, but she likes it anyway.

“It sounds like he’s singing,” she said. “I don’t know (what he’s) saying, but I like it. It sounds funny.”

But there are plenty here who understand perfectly the lilting cadence of Korrey and auctioneer Greg Highsmith. With smooth efficiency, they plow through the more than 650 pickup trucks and pieces of heavy equipment, with buyers paying anywhere from $25 for a generator to about $100,000 for a road grader.

“I think the auctioneers are vital to this,” said Rob Giroux, regional manager for Ritchie Bros. “They’re easy to understand, for novice folks. If you take the auto industry, for example, the buyers that go there go to two or three sales a week and they’re very educated, so the auctioneers tend to (speak) much quicker. Our guys have to be very clear and concise, easy to understand.”

Many listening intently to the auctioneers while moving down the line of cranes, backhoes and bulldozers were contractors and industry representatives looking to bolster their businesses. Others, like Jack Ohmen of Fairbanks, used the sale as an opportunity to try and pick up a little something for personal use.

“I came to look at a crawler, a bulldozer,” Ohmen said. He found one, “but it went for a little more than I wanted. It went for $18,000, and I got a limit of $16,000 and that’s it.”

Had he won the crawler, Ohmen said he planned to use it on his property.

“Just doing a little bit of clearing for myself,” he said.

But the trip wasn’t wasted. In addition to visiting with family in the Valley, Ohmen said the auction was good entertainment.

“It’s kind of a social event,” he said, adding that Ritchie Bros. runs a “first-class auction.”

Then there were those like Harvey Eads of Sterling, who was looking to purchase equipment for resale. After providing the winning bid on a 40-ton crane, he said the quality and variety at Saturday’s event was good, but the volume of the loudspeakers “creates a lot of racket.”

While locals milled around the lot inspecting the merchandise, the auction was being monitored around the globe via the Internet, Giroux said.

“There have been people from Dubai bidding online in real time,” he said. “If you bid from Saudi Arabia, for example, there’s a speaker in the auctioneer’s booth (to record a bid). We had a grader go to Saudi Arabia, this Cat went to Arizona.”

Many may have been looking for a once-in-a-lifetime bargain, but those are few and far between, Giroux said.

“Well, it’s a public auction, so there’s no minimum bids, no reserve prices, so everything sells to the highest bidder,” he said. “You’ll always have brokers and dealers come, but if you talk to the guys and ask them if they were successful or not, I would say nine times out of 10 they bid the prices up to a wholesale level, where they can take it and mark it up. For the end users who are here, typically they will bid it past that, somewhere between wholesale and retail.”

Most of the items sold Saturday came from North Slope companies, he said. Although bidders from around the world tuned in online, Paul Newlind of Sydney, Australia, was having fun taking in the production at the fairgrounds.

“We were just driving by and saw all this and came to take a look,” he said. “I think it’s really interesting there’s this much capital equipment turning over.”

Newlind was also intrigued by the auctioneers, who “are a little different from Australian auctioneers. They have a different cadence, a different way they go about closing a deal.”

After spending an afternoon at the Ritchie Bros. Auction, you may be able tokeepupwiththeauctioneerafterall.

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.