Eastern Europe Car Auction Watcher

Eastern Europe Car Auction Watcher monitors public vehicle auction listings across Central and Eastern Europe-adjacent auction sources and turns raw lot pages into structured dealer intelligence.

The Actor is built for used-car dealers, exporters, rebuilders, fleet buyers, brokers, and auction analysts who need to spot fresh lots, damaged vehicles, urgent auctions, and high-potential resale candidates before competitors.

What It Does

• Crawls public car auction listing pages
• Extracts lot title, source, lot ID, country, registration date, mileage, auction type, time remaining, images, and detail metadata
• Opens detail pages when enabled
• Scores each vehicle with riskScore, dealScore, and urgencyScore
• Classifies visible damage and risk signals from public text
• Tracks previous runs and marks lots as new, changed, or unchanged
• Supports preview mode capped at 50 redacted dataset rows and full paid dataset mode

Supported Sources

The MVP supports:

• webautobid public auction listings

The input also supports custom startUrls, so additional public auction/listing pages can be tested without code changes.

Example Input

{
  "accessMode": "preview",
  "sources": ["webautobid"],
  "countries": [],
  "makes": [],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "freePreviewLimit": 50,
  "maxPagesPerSource": 6,
  "includeDetails": true,
  "includeImages": true,
  "monitoring": true
}

Preview And Full Mode

preview mode is for evaluation. It writes up to 50 redacted auction rows to the default dataset so they appear in the normal Apify Results tab. It also stores the same rows in the PREVIEW key-value-store record for convenience.

full mode writes complete rows to the default dataset using Actor.pushData(). It is intended for paid Apify usage and can be combined with filters such as countries, makes, keywords, minDealScore, and minRiskScore.

Output Fields

Each lot can include:

• source
• lotId
• title
• url
• make
• model
• variant
• year
• firstRegistration
• mileageKm
• country
• countryCode
• auctionType
• timeRemaining
• auctionEndsAt
• fuelType
• bodyType
• transmission
• imageCount
• damageCategory
• riskScore
• riskSignals
• dealScore
• dealSignals
• urgencyScore
• recommendation
• firstSeenAt
• lastSeenAt
• monitoringStatus
• isNewLot

Example Output

{
  "source": "webautobid",
  "lotId": "22899732",
  "title": "BMW IX3 80KWH AUTO",
  "make": "BMW",
  "model": "BMW IX3 80KWH AUTO",
  "year": 2021,
  "firstRegistration": "2021-09-21",
  "mileageKm": 58587,
  "country": "Belgium",
  "auctionType": "Target auction, standard",
  "timeRemaining": "0 - 12:41:44",
  "damageCategory": "none_detected",
  "riskScore": 10,
  "dealScore": 87,
  "urgencyScore": 80,
  "recommendation": "High-priority watch. Validate fees and set bid ceiling before auction close.",
  "monitoringStatus": "new"
}

Scoring

Risk scoring is heuristic. It looks for visible public signals such as accident language, front/rear/side damage, mechanical defects, flood/water damage, electric battery issues, blind auctions, and high mileage.

Deal scoring is also heuristic. It rewards stronger resale makes, recent model years, moderate mileage, in-demand powertrains, CEE locations, and urgent auctions. High risk reduces the deal score.

Urgency scoring is based on public time remaining.

Previous-Run Monitoring

When monitoring is enabled, the Actor stores lot state in the named key-value store. Future runs compare lot signatures and mark each row as:

• new
• changed
• unchanged

Suggested Schedule

• Every 2-6 hours for active buyers
• Daily for market research
• Weekly for broad stock-flow analysis

Limitations

• Some auction platforms require login; this Actor only extracts public data.
• Public listings may hide VIN, final bid, seller identity, or full damage reports.
• Scores are heuristic and should not replace inspection, history checks, transport cost calculation, or repair estimates.
• Source websites may change HTML structure or block requests.
• Auction fees, VAT, import tax, and transport costs are not calculated automatically in this MVP.

Local Run

npm install
apify run --input-file INPUT.example.json

Push To Apify

apify login
apify push