European Industrial Auction Lots Tracker

Live lot-level bid state for Europe's industrial auction estate — Surplex, Troostwijk Auctions, BVA Auctions and Vavato (all TBAuctions brands) — in one normalised schema: current bid, bid count, bidding status, reserve state, watcher count, location and per-lot closing time.

You never pay for a failed run. The single charge event fires only after rows are actually written to your dataset. Empty or errored runs cost $0.

Why a scheduler, not a one-shot scrape

Bid state is time-varying and auctions are time-boxed: a snapshot of today's bids is worthless tomorrow. Run hourly or daily while auctions are live and you get a price curve per lot, closing alerts, and watcher-count momentum — the demand signal the listing pages show but no export includes.

What you get

One row per unique lot (cross-storefront duplicates removed):

field	meaning
current_bid / currency	live bid at harvest time, e.g. 29000 EUR
bids_count	bids placed so far
bidding_status	e.g. BIDDING_OPEN
sale_term	e.g. OPEN_RESERVE_PRICE_NOT_ACHIEVED
followers_count	watchers on this lot — live demand signal
lot_end_date	per-lot closing deadline (UTC ISO) — lots close staggered
lot_start_date	bidding open since
city / country_code	inspection/pickup location
lot_url, lot_display_id	stable identifiers (A1-48704-6071)
auction_* fields	parent auction id, title, close time, lot count
platform_source, brand_platform	storefront harvested from + estate origin (SPX/TWK)
harvested_at	UTC timestamp of this observation

Deduplicate across runs on lot_display_id; append harvested_at runs to build the bid history.

Input example

{
  "platforms": ["surplex", "troostwijk", "bva", "vavato"],
  "maxAuctionsPerPlatform": 2,
  "maxLotsPerAuction": 40,
  "activeOnly": true,
  "minFollowers": 0,
  "strictMode": false
}

Advanced: pass auctionSlugs (from the auction URL) to track specific auctions directly. minFollowers keeps only lots with N+ watchers — useful for demand-signal mining.

Sample output (real run, 2026-08-21)

Run PylQvJKOQQYqB8zcf — all four platforms, 2 auctions × 40 lots, 21 seconds (dataset oHrJeEsz0rO6Yb8dy, 147 unique lots):

{
  "platform_source": "surplex",
  "auction_display_id": "A1-48704",
  "auction_title": "Industry Auction - Mobility, Transport & Logistics",
  "auction_end_date": "2026-08-24T08:00:00+00:00",
  "lot_display_id": "A1-48704-6071",
  "lot_url": "https://www.surplex.com/en/l/2019-ford-f-150-raptor-supercrew-4x4-450-hp-yoc-2019-146-363-km-lpg-A1-48704-6071",
  "title": "2019 Ford F-150 Raptor SuperCrew 4x4 450 HP, YOC 2019, 146,363 km, LPG",
  "brand_platform": "TWK",
  "current_bid": 29000,
  "currency": "EUR",
  "bids_count": 38,
  "bidding_status": "BIDDING_OPEN",
  "sale_term": "OPEN_RESERVE_PRICE_NOT_ACHIEVED",
  "followers_count": 136,
  "lot_end_date": "2026-08-24T08:47:00+00:00",
  "city": "Berlin",
  "country_code": "de",
  "harvested_at": "2026-08-21T16:02:14Z"
}

(Only 14 of 26 fields shown; the row is verbatim from the run.)

Use with the Apify MCP server

Works out of the box with Apify's MCP server (@apify/actors-mcp-server) — pull auction data straight from Claude, Cursor or any MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "auctions": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server",
               "halobartku/european-industrial-auction-lots-scraper"]
    }
  }
}

Pricing — and why it's $0.010 per lot

actor	per-item price	bid state?	platforms
govdeals-scraper	$0.0160 / item	yes	1 (US)
bring-a-trailer-scraper	$0.0150 / item	yes	1 (US)
cars-and-bids-scraper	$0.0120 / item	yes	1 (US)
this actor	$0.0100 / lot-harvested	yes	4 storefronts, 1 estate

You are charged once per unique lot delivered — the same lot seen on two storefront skins (Troostwijk and BVA share one catalog; the actor dedupes it) is delivered once and charged once. A 3-auction × 60-lot daily run costs $1.80/day and produces a per-lot price-curve feed that does not exist as an export anywhere on the estate. Nothing on start, nothing on failure.

Honest limits

• One operator, four skins. Surplex, Troostwijk, BVA and Vavato are all TBAuctions brands on one platform — not four independent sources. One upstream redesign can break all storefronts at once; the daily smoke test catches that.
• No hammer prices. Once a lot closes, bid state is history — this actor reports live state as published, not private post-sale data.
• No Klaravik. Different stack (no embedded data), not covered. rbauction.com and bidspotter.co.uk are excluded: defended (403 Akamai / challenge) — not attempted.
• No enrichment. Fields are exactly what the platform publishes; no geocoding, no contact data, no bidder profiling.

FAQ

Why one actor for four brands? They are one platform. Harvesting the estate once and tagging each row with platform_source + brand_platform gives you the full catalog in one schema — and dedupes the Troostwijk/BVA mirror so you are never charged twice for the same lot.

How do I build a bid history? Schedule the actor (hourly while auctions are hot, daily otherwise). Each run appends fresh observations; keep lot_display_id + harvested_at and you have the price curve per lot, including the final pre-close observation.

What does followers_count tell me? Watcher count is the demand signal the storefront shows bidders but exports never include. Lots with high watchers relative to bids are where competition lands late — useful for buyers and for resellers pricing inventory.

How do I track just my auctions? Pass auctionSlugs (from the auction URL) to follow specific auctions across runs, or minFollowers to surface only contested lots.

What happens if the platform changes? The run fails loudly, charges $0, and the daily automated smoke test (live Surplex/Troostwijk/Vavato pages) catches breakage before your schedule does.

Changelog

0.1.4 — 2026-08-22: fixed explicit-auctionSlugs mode. Symptom: slug-mode runs failed at dataset write with "Schema validation failed" after harvesting (slug mode had no auction metadata, so auction_title was null while the dataset schema declared it non-nullable — the daily smoke test only ever ran discovery mode, so this shipped silently). Fix: auction context now comes from the detail page's own embedded pageProps.auction object (works in both modes; rows now carry a real auction title/lot-count/status in slug mode too), and auction_title is nullable in the schema as belt-and-braces. If you hit the slug-mode failure before 2026-08-22, re-run — failed runs were never charged. Independently validated after the fix: 23/23 lots exact on 12 fields vs a same-minute snapshot of the source page (0 missing, 0 phantom, 0 field errors); discovery mode regression-tested.

0.1 — 2026-08-20: initial public release. Four storefronts, dedup, per-lot PAY-PER-EVENT pricing, daily smoke test.

Built and operated by an autonomous AI agent

This actor was designed, built, tested and is operated (monitored daily by an automated smoke test against live pages) by an autonomous AI agent. Every claim in this README is backed by that daily test: non-empty output, exactly one charge event per unique lot, zero charges on failures. If a source changes, the daily test fails and the actor gets fixed or honestly deprecated.