🔨 Invaluable Scraper

Extract auction lots from Invaluable, the marketplace where thousands of auction houses (Sotheby's, Freeman's | Hindman, Leonard Joel and many more) sell art, jewelry, watches, antiques, coins, furniture, wine and collectibles. Get prices realized from 100M+ past lots going back to 1997, or upcoming and live lots with their current bids, in one clean table.

Each lot comes with:

• Price realized, low and high estimate, and how the price compared to the estimate in %.
• Current bid, number of bids and watchers.
• Auction date (UTC and local), lot closing time, listing date, auction type (live, timed, view only).
• Category, subcategory and the house's own category.
• Artist or maker with a link to the artist page.
• Auction house name, ID and link, the auction catalog and its link.
• Location, state, country and map coordinates.
• Full catalog description, condition notes, the photo and the link to the lot.

🎯 Who uses it?

🧑‍⚖️ Appraisers, insurers and estate planners

Pull every comparable sale of an artist, maker, model or category with prices and estimates, filtered by date and price, for valuations you can back up.

💎 Dealers, resellers and flippers

See what Rolex Daytonas, Tiffany lamps or Banksy prints really sell for, then find upcoming lots with no bids and bid below the market.

📊 Market researchers and collectors

Track an artist, a brand or a category year by year. Compare estimates with prices realized to spot what sells above or below expectations.

🏛️ Auction houses

Benchmark competitors: what they sell, how many lots, and how their lots perform against estimate.

✨ What it does

• Three modes. Prices realized (sold lots), all past lots (sold or not) or upcoming and live lots.
• Search the way you think:
  • Search terms ("rolex daytona", "tiffany lamp", "banksy"), several per run.
  • 108 categories and subcategories, from Jewelry > Men's Watches to Fine Art > Paintings and Wines & Spirits > Whiskeys.
  • Artists or makers ("Andy Warhol", "Rene Lalique"), matched to Invaluable's own artist list, aliases included.
  • Auction houses by name or ID.
• Or paste Invaluable links: a lot, a whole auction catalog, an artist page, an auction house page, a category page or a search. With links the filters are ignored.
• Every useful filter:
  • Auction date range: exact dates, or periods like "30 days" (ago for past lots, ahead for upcoming lots).
  • Price realized, estimate, current bid and bid count ranges.
  • Auction house country, and for upcoming lots the state or region and the auction type.
  • Words that must not appear in the title or description.
  • 8 sort orders: most recent or soonest, oldest, highest and lowest price, most bids, newly listed, lot number, best match.
• New lots only. For scheduled runs: saves only lots the same search has not saved before.

🏆 Why this scraper

• No result cap. Invaluable's search lists only a few thousand lots of a big search. This scraper splits big searches into auction date windows (and lot number bands for huge sales), so you get every lot: tested at 23,268 "tiffany lamp" sales in 81 seconds, in date order and with no duplicates.
• Fast. About 1,000 lots in 6 seconds.
• Description included. The full catalog text and condition notes come with every lot, at no extra cost.
• Prices you can analyse. Prices, estimates, price vs estimate %, bids and watchers are numbers. Dates are ISO. Photo URLs are ready to download.
• Private data stays private. Who watched, bid on or won a lot is never collected, only the counts.
• No proxy needed. Nothing extra to set up or pay for.

📦 What data you get

Field	Description
lotRef, url	Invaluable lot ID and the lot page.
lotNumber, title	The lot as listed in the catalog.
status	Sold, Unsold or not reported, Upcoming, Live or Closed.
priceRealized, currency, currencySymbol	What the lot sold for, as the house reported it, in the lot's currency.
lowEstimate, highEstimate, priceVsEstimatePct	The house's estimate, and how far the price landed above or below the middle of it (0 = right on estimate, 50 = 50% above).
currentBid, bidCount, watchers	Bidding data. For past lots currentBid is the last online bid.
saleType, auctionDate, auctionDateLocal, lotClosesAt, listedAt	Live, timed or view only; auction start in UTC and house local time; when a timed lot closes; when it was listed.
category, subcategory, subSubcategory, houseCategory	Invaluable's categories and the house's own one.
artist, artistRef, artistUrl	Artist or maker, when the house set one.
auctionHouse, houseRef, houseUrl	Who sells it.
auctionRef, auctionUrl	The auction catalog the lot belongs to.
location, state, country, latitude, longitude	Where the house or sale is.
onlineOnly, featured	Online-only sale; featured lot.
description, conditionNotes	Full catalog text and condition notes.
image	Main photo.
searchedFor	Which of your searches or links found it.
scrapedAt	When the row was collected (UTC).

Example row (trimmed)

{
  "lotRef": "C6AB47CC42",
  "lotNumber": "2287",
  "title": "Cosmograph Daytona “The King”, Reference 6270 | A highly important yellow gold, diamond and sapphire-set chronograph wristwatch with bracelet, Circa 1985",
  "status": "Sold",
  "priceRealized": 40635000,
  "currency": "HKD",
  "lowEstimate": 16000000,
  "highEstimate": 32000000,
  "priceVsEstimatePct": 69.3,
  "saleType": "View Only",
  "auctionDate": "2025-10-21T03:00:00.000Z",
  "auctionDateLocal": "2025-10-21 11:00:00",
  "category": "Jewelry",
  "subcategory": "Watches, Men's",
  "auctionHouse": "Sotheby's",
  "houseUrl": "https://www.invaluable.com/auction-house/sothebys-4wsxvotis6",
  "auctionUrl": "https://www.invaluable.com/catalog/vlyzf82nkz",
  "location": "Hong Kong, HK",
  "country": "Hong Kong",
  "description": "Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “The King”, Reference 6270 A highly important yellow gold, diamond and sapphire-set chronograph wristwatch...",
  "image": "https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/sothebys/74/802074/H0046-L419824081.jpg",
  "url": "https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/cosmograph-daytona-the-king-reference-6270-a-high-2287-c-c6ab47cc42",
  "searchedFor": "\"rolex daytona\"",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-07T20:26:27.072Z"
}

💡 Use cases

📈 Every Rolex Daytona sold in the last 3 years

{ "searchTerms": ["rolex daytona"], "dateFrom": "3 years", "maxItems": null }

🏺 Chinese art that sold for $1,000 to $10,000 in the US

{ "categories": ["KEDZ10Y647"], "countries": ["United States of America"], "minPrice": 1000, "maxPrice": 10000, "maxItems": null }

🎨 Andy Warhol, highest price first

{ "artists": ["Andy Warhol"], "sortBy": "price_high", "maxItems": 500 }

🔔 New upcoming whiskey lots with no bids, every morning

{ "mode": "upcoming", "categories": ["B244HNR1T1"], "maxBids": 0, "onlyNew": true, "maxItems": null }

📚 A whole auction catalog

{ "urls": ["https://www.invaluable.com/catalog/vlyzf82nkz"], "mode": "past", "maxItems": null }

⚙️ How the input is organised

Section	What it's for
Maximum lots and What to scrape	Always first: caps the whole run (shared across your searches; empty means no limit), and the mode.
Search with filters	Search terms, categories, artists, auction houses.
When and where	Auction date range, country, state or region.
Prices and bids	Price realized, estimate, current bid and bid count ranges, auction type, words to exclude.
Or search with links	Invaluable links. When links are given, the filters above are ignored.
Order and monitoring	Sort order, new lots only, monitor name.

Search terms, categories and artists combine: each term is searched in each category, for each artist. The other filters narrow every search. Links and filters are not mixed: with links, the filters are ignored and the log says which ones.

💰 Pricing

Pay-per-event: a one-time $0.003 when the run starts, plus a price per lot saved to your dataset that drops with your Apify plan.

Your Apify plan	Per lot	1,000 lots
Free	$0.018	$18.00
Bronze	$0.016	$16.00
Silver	$0.014	$14.00
Gold / Platinum / Diamond	$0.012	$12.00

Lots dropped by your filters are not charged. There are no proxy costs. New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit. On the Free plan a run saves up to 10 lots.

Speed: about 1,000 lots in 6 seconds.

🚀 Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Invaluable Scraper.
3. Type a search term (or keep the prefilled one), pick the mode and your filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

You can also:

• Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.
• Schedule it with Apify's built-in Scheduler, with New lots only on, to catch new lots every day.

🤖 Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to auction prices through the Model Context Protocol:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=normdata/invaluable-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language, for example "what did Rene Lalique vases sell for this year?".

🔧 Troubleshooting

The log says "Big search ... split into auction date windows". That's normal. Invaluable lists only part of a big search at once, so bigger searches are collected window by window. Rows still come in the order you asked: the first ones in your sort, the rest by date.

An artist was searched as keywords. The name is not in Invaluable's artist list, so it was added to the search words instead. Results are still relevant, just less strict.

Prices are in different currencies. Each lot keeps its house's currency (currency). Price filters apply in that currency.

Some sold lots have no price. Not every house reports its results. Use All past lots to include them, or Prices realized to keep only lots with a price.

A filter was ignored. Some filters only fit one mode (state and auction type are for upcoming lots, price realized for past lots), and links ignore all filters. The log names each ignored filter.

A scheduled "New lots only" run saved nothing. Nothing new matched since the last run. Changing terms, links or filters starts a fresh memory; set a Monitor name to keep it.

❓ FAQ

Question	Answer
Do I need an Invaluable account?	No. Only public lot data is read.
Does the price include the buyer's premium?	It's the price the house reported to Invaluable, which often includes the premium. Check the house's terms when it matters.
How far back do past lots go?	To the late 1990s. Use the date range to pick a period.
Is there a result limit?	No. Leave the maximum empty to get the whole search.
Does it need a proxy?	No. There is an optional proxy setting if Invaluable ever slows down your runs.
Can I track new lots?	Yes. Turn on New lots only and schedule the run.

🛡️ Limits & responsible use

This Actor reads only public lot data shown on Invaluable. It never signs in, never bids and never contacts auction houses. Who watched, bid on or won a lot is not collected. Use the data in line with Invaluable's terms.

📧 Contact

Need a scraper for a different site, or found something wrong with this one? norm.data.scrapers@gmail.com

🧪 Local development

bun install
bun run typecheck
bun test/qa.mjs
apify run

Local results are stored in storage/datasets/default.