With you out of the auction, he might be able to get it for very much less. Does all of this mean that there is no chance that any of us will profit from our rug collecting. It just isn't the sort of thing you want to use for retirement planning. Good collectible rugs do tend to increase in value over fairly long periods, but you also have to be aware that collector fashions change over time. The current fashion among collectors is heavily toward tribal and rustic weavings, but this hasn't always been so and could change without much warning.
Unanticipated events can dramatically alter the supply of certain kinds of rugs.
For example, the collapse of the USSR brought down the prices of Caucasian rugs this way. All of that said, suppose you still want to make investment a major consideration in your purchases. You understand the risks, but would like to do it anyway. Well, you certainly want to make some attempts to predict where the ever-changing fashions are going to take the market. My impression, for whatever it's worth, is that Belouch, South Persian and Kurdish pieces have been the ones most rapidly gaining favor with collectors over the past 10 years or so, and these would be fairly high on my list.