Echo $result so that you can see what is wrong with it. The error you got is typical of the numerical variable on the end of the query being empty.
If the AuctionRate column is a numeric data type, you would not want to enclose it in single-quotes in the query, especially if it is a DECIMAL data type as the single-quotes force a conversion to a FLOAT value, which can result in a floating point conversion error that the direct input of a DECIMAL data value would not have.