Lydia Fenet, Broad Arrow’s Principal Auctioneer, Has Mastered Her Craft

One hour into Broad Arrow’s first live car auction, in Monterey, 2022, the auctioneer scribbled something on a piece of paper. Her reader, Alain Squindo, who shared the stage with her, glanced down. Is this going OK? It read."

Lydia Fenet had been taking auctions for decades—charity ones, specifically—and she built much of her expertise during 24 years at Christie’s, where she raised over half a billion dollars for nonprofits in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. This auction was different, and not simply because she was selling cars. A charity auction might last 30 minutes, an art auction perhaps three hours. A car auction lasts even longer, and the auctioneer must move 18 to 20 lots every hour. That year in Monterey, Broad Arrow’s was scheduled for five.

Alain wrote back: It’s fantastic.

Fenet had only joined the Broad Arrow team a few months earlier, in March. When the head of the marketing team, Ian Kelleher, first reached out to her, she was a little bit skeptical — she had never really thought about taking car auctions. Eventually, curiosity won: There was just something in it that to me seemed exciting and new.

Fenet has spent her whole life on stage. Growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, she sang in church choir and in a cappella groups and took part in plays— so many plays! During a study abroad program at Oxford during college, she ran across an article in Vanity Fair about a collection of Princess Diana’s dresses that Christie’s was selling for charity. I was totally captivated. She nagged the internship program director at Christie’s until they added a spot for her—the program was already full.

After graduating from The University of the South in 1999, Fenet went to work at Christie’s in its special events department. When the opportunity arose to try out to become an auctioneer for Christie’s, she marched down to the sale room. After four days of tryouts, she was still standing. She was 24 years old, the youngest Christie’s auctioneer by a decade, and the only woman.

While being a woman wasn’t viewed as an asset by others earlier in my auctioneering career, Fenet told Canvas Rebel last November, it ultimately became my biggest asset because I was different from everyone else, and totally memorable. I learned to command a room in a different way. Not better or worse, just different.

She spent 70 to 100 nights a year on stage while balancing life with her family in Manhattan: Her husband, Chris Delaney, and their three children, Beatrice, Henry, and Eloise.

She didn’t simply hone her craft at Christie’s; she taught it to twelve classes of charity auctioneers. While she believes anyone can become an auctioneer, she also says that there are some qualities you can’t teach. I would often say that there was always one person who I knew would pass. Maybe they’d done drama in high school or they just had something—that sort of star quality that you couldn’t ignore. And so even if they didn’t have the technical skills to be an auctioneer, there was something about them that I wanted to watch on stage. One simple way she would evaluate the stage presence of her students was by asking them to tell a two-minute story.

If you ask a friend to tell you a story while they’re sitting next to you, they’ll easily do it. If you ask ’em to stand in front of a room of 10 people, you should see how quickly the nerves take over.

Fenet taught her auctioneers everything from voice control to breathing to the [bidding] increments and where to be pushing and where to be pulling back. The most important part, she says, is the interplay between the auctioneer and the crowd. She teaches her students the tools that they have to influence that back-and-forth between them in the crowd: hand motions, eye contact, and silence. So many people think auctioneering is rapid talking, Fenet says, but silence can be a very effective tool.

The job of an auctioneer, according to Fenet, is twofold: Number one, I work on behalf of the consignor, not the person who’s buying it. So my job is to honor the consignor, but the second part of that is I always want to be kind to the audience. I don’t want to push them into something that they don’t want to buy. I don’t want to trick them into doing anything because you do that once, they’ll never come back.

An auctioneer, then, must tread deftly enough to not push bidders beyond their boundaries while also making sure they don’t leave money on the table. Understanding human psychology is huge. “You have to look at the person while they are thinking,” says Fenet, “and give them the time and space to make the right decision, which is obviously to bid.” (She says this last phrase with a dash of humor.) If you’ve been in the auction room with Fenet, you know that she trains her eyes like a laser on certain people in the room, addressing herself directly to them, occasionally by name, working the mood of the room by joking, to lighten the tension, or holding quiet, to deepen it. Here’s what’s going on up on the stage—as she’s calculating bid increments in her head, interpreting hand gestures from the team, recalculating reserve prices, watching the phone bank, and maintaining a calm, confident smile:

“Usually I’m looking for two things. First of all, let’s say it’s a couple. I’m looking for the person who is probably making the decision, or the person who really wants the car, and I’m speaking to that person.

“That can also happen with friends. I’ll see two guys sitting next to each other, and they’re kind of egging each other on. So I will literally say to the person who’s sitting next to the person who’s bidding, ‘Help your friend make a good decision here.’”

Actions often speak louder than words.

“If [the paddle] is on their lap and [the bidder’s] hand’s still touching the paddle, there is a chance that they’re going to bid. If their hand moves away or they sort of shake their head or something like that, then I have an idea that they might be backing off. It doesn’t mean that it’s a hundred percent not done, it just means they’re going to think about it a little bit more.”

She believes in “always allowing the person to think through that last moment to give them the opportunity to do that bid.” At the beginning of an auction, when paddles are up everywhere in the room, she’ll fly through the increments, keeping the pace and excitement high. As the bidding starts to slow, so does her cadence. She starts giving people more time to think.

“I’ll say, ‘going once’ and then I’ll just hold for a second. And at that point, I’m usually still looking at the under-bidder. I’m not looking at the winning bidder, because that person already has it. That’s not the person I’m trying to influence. And then a sort of slow ‘going twice,’ and if someone’s going to make a split-second decision, that’s when it’s happening. It’s not going to happen [during] the going-once-going-twice-SOLD! So that’s how I use silence.”

As bidding for that lot culminates, her attention remains on the bidder in the second position. “The under-bidder is actually more important in many cases than the bidder, because without them, the bidding sucks.” Her job is to play them off each other, but the auction can always take a turn: “There might be somebody else who jumps in at that last minute who takes them both out.”

“So that’s the fun of it. It’s such a game.”

Fenet’s auctioneering style, as seen at Broad Arrow, is a mix of what she’s learned from art and from charity auctions. She uses the same clarity of diction that you’d expect to hear at a fine art auction: “[Audience members] can also clearly understand what they’re bidding on, and how much they’re bidding on it, so [the auction] doesn’t feel quite as fast and frantic and frenetic.” The atmosphere of a collector-car auction, however, isn’t as formal of a fine art auction. In it, explains Fenet, “a fifth wall” of sorts stands between auctioneer and audience: “You take their bid, but you don’t talk to them. You’re not encouraging their bid.” Charity auctions, Fenet’s specialty for so many years, are the opposite: The auctioneer is an entertainer, cracking jokes to keep people engaged, not just taking bids but “goading them into bidding.” Fenet’s style at Broad Arrow auctions pairs the clarity of the art world with a sensitive dose of the entertainment of a charity auction.

Her understanding of her role as entertainer helps her maintain interest. “The car auctions are five hours long—so long! There’s got to be something that people are coming back in for if they’re not bidding, right?”

After three years at Broad Arrow, Fenet has not only found her own rhythm but developed a deep knowledge of the space. After that first Broad Arrow auction in 2022, she went straight to her room and flopped down on the hotel bed, wondering if her head was going to explode. Now, the Broad Arrow team can toss her a charity auction after she’s done two five- or six-hour auctions in as many days. She simply changes into a different cocktail dress and heads back on stage. She knows many of the people in the audience and always remembers which people feel special when she calls them out by name, and which people prefer not to be acknowledged, and bid at certain, very specific increments.

“At this point,” she says, “what makes me good is experience.”

She enjoys a great relationship with the team at Broad Arrow. “My favorite thing to do is fly in for these sales and spend three or four days with a team. I feel like I leave with broken ribs from laughing so hard.” She’ll see them in just a few days, in fact—The Amelia kicks off on March 6 at the Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, and Broad Arrow is hosting a two-day sale (March 7–8).

Fenet is ready—she’s even gone through her multiple closets and picked out her outfits. (And her signature statement earrings, of course.) It’s not simply that she enjoys Lela Rose, Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, or the occasional Tuckernuck treasure; a great outfit is an auctioneer’s armor. “I see [an auction] as a performance, so it makes sense that I should be dressed for stage, and that’s really how I feel.” She describes her personal style as tailored, not trendy; “I hope it looks elegant, professional, but with a little bit of a twist.”

If you’re at the Amelia auctions next weekend, one thing’s for sure: You won’t miss Lydia Fenet.