German Government Auctions Scraper (Zoll-Auktion & Justiz-Auktion)

German public authorities sell what they seize, confiscate, find and retire — on two official portals, both run by the state itself:

• zoll-auktion.de, operated by the German customs administration (Generalzolldirektion) for the federal government, the states and municipalities — 2,225 live lots
• justiz-auktion.de, operated by the justice administration for courts and bailiffs, Germany and Austria — 307 live lots

This Actor collects both into one schema: current bid, bid count, end time, the selling authority, the pickup address, the case worker's phone number and e-mail, and the item specifications parsed out of the free-text description.

Everything sold here is collection-only and sold as-is, which is exactly why the location and the contact matter as much as the price.

What you get

Fields a lot does not contain are null — never guessed.

Four things this Actor does that the portals make hard

1. It brings you the contact, not just the listing. Every lot on zoll-auktion.de names a case worker, and the Actor got a phone number and an e-mail address for 2,224 of 2,225 lots across 611 different authorities in a full sweep. That data sits on the detail page only — a result-list scraper never sees it. The portal itself splits those addresses with layout hyphens, so a naive read returns name@ and behoerde.de as two fragments.

2. It parses the specifications out of prose. Authorities type the description by hand, but most keep to Label: value per line. The Actor turns that into a merkmale object — 80% of lots carry one, averaging 7.8 fields, and cars bring a median of 13: make, model, first registration, mileage, fuel, transmission, emission class, inspection status, VIN, tyre tread depth, listed defects. That is what makes the data filterable instead of readable.

About one lot in ten has several attributes crammed into a single line because the line break was missed while typing (

Fahrzeug-Ident-Nr.: WV1ZZZ… Leistung: 103 kW …

3. null means no bid, not zero. Both portals display 0,00 € for a lot nobody has bid on, and zoll-auktion.de puts the starting price into the same field its structured data uses for the current bid. Reading either literally tells you a Caddy is going for nothing. Here aktuellesGebot is null until someone actually bids — 54% of lots are in that state — while the starting price stays in mindestgebot, and price filters fall back to it.

4. In monitor mode you only get — and only pay for — lots that actually changed. Switch on nurGeaenderte and the Actor compares bid, bid count, minimum bid and end time against the previous run, and keeps quiet about everything else. A second run over all 307 justice lots right after the first returns zero records.

Where the portal allows it, that saving reaches the requests too: zoll-auktion.de keeps honest lastmod stamps in its sitemap (1,976 distinct values across 2,225 lots, spread over days), so unchanged detail pages are never fetched. justiz-auktion.de stamps every request with the current time — that value is worthless as a change signal, and the Actor does not pretend otherwise; there it still reads the pages but reports only real changes.

Without monitor mode, a full sweep is 2,532 lots in about three minutes.

Typical uses

• Dealer sourcing — filter by category and postcode radius, get vehicles, machinery or IT hardware with specs, location and closing time
• Bid monitoring — run it on a schedule with nurGeaenderte and watch bids move on the lots you care about; nobody can reconstruct that history later
• Price research — what does a retired municipal transporter actually fetch, by state and category
• Public-sector procurement leads — 611 authorities with named contacts, each of them regularly disposing of assets

Input

Everything is optional. With no input at all the Actor returns the 20 lots closing next across both portals.

Notes on the source

Both portals explicitly allow crawling: zoll-auktion.de publishes Allow: /, justiz-auktion.de an empty Disallow:, and both link their sitemaps from robots.txt. The Actor uses those sitemaps as its index and reads the schema.org structured data the portals maintain for search engines.

Lots disappear from both portals once an auction has ended, so historical data cannot be recovered afterwards — only collected as it happens.

The contact details in ansprechpartner are official addresses that the authorities publish themselves for exactly this purpose: so that interested buyers can get in touch.

Related Actors

• German Insolvency Announcements — insolvency filings from the official register, with administrator contacts and claim deadlines
• German Insolvency Check — screen a list of company or personal names against that register, one row per name
• German Foreclosure Auctions — court-ordered property auctions with dates, appraised values and addresses