I would recommend between 15-25 items for the live auction, with your auctioneer assisting in the choosing of which items to include in the live auction. After you have pretty well agreed on how many items for the live auction, you should also get imput from the auctioneer on how much time it will take, and I recommend that you have a target total time for the live auction to be not much more than onw hour.
For the silent auction, I would recommend that you strive for at least 200 items, and then strive to get up to 400 items or so. Keep n mind, the more items, the more money. One restricting factor that you will encounter is how much space you have to display the items so that they are not covering other items up, buy not too spread out either.
I would also suggest that you have all the silent auction tables "close" prior to the start of the live auction, to allow your cashiers adequate time to tally the ilent auction items, and then you will only have the live auction items to tally at the end, which will help your attendees to be able get get "checked out" in the shortest time possible.
I am curious if anyone has recommendations for a good number of live vs. silent auction items. I know a professional auctioneer would help with all this and actually I have been in contact with a fabulous one in Mass. but can't afford him currently- therefore if anyone has good input on this matter I would greatly appreciate it. Years ago when we did an auction we had about 300 items -27 were via live auction and the rest were silent/raffles.
