Your own auction environment for property, art, industrial equipment or B2B surplus. With real-time bidding, lot management, KYC for bidders and an auction mechanism that suits your sector — English, Dutch, sealed-bid or reverse.
A good auction platform lives or dies in the final fifteen seconds. The time extension has to be right, proxy bids have to process flawlessly, and not a single bid may be lost, even when a thousand users press the hammer button at once. Off-the-shelf platforms such as Catawiki or eBay are fine for a broad audience, but they fall short as soon as you need sector-specific flows, your own auction formats or a white-label brand.
We build auction platforms for property auction houses, art and antiques dealers, curators, industrial liquidation firms and B2B procurement teams. Each one is tailored to your auction format, your legal context and your bidder audience, so you don't have to force your working process into the mould of a standard package.
What technically sets an auction platform apart from a regular webshop is the combination of real-time bidder coordination, legal evidentiary requirements and a lot-rich content structure. In a webshop an order only becomes a transaction once the customer clicks pay; in an auction every bid is a legally relevant act that you may need to reconstruct years later. That changes how you design logging, infrastructure and interface, from the very first sprint.
An auction platform also plays a dual role: it is both your operational tool and your publicly visible brand. Lot managers, financial processing and marketing all work in it, while bidders and viewers experience it as the showroom of your auction house. That calls for two user experiences that fit together seamlessly, and for a design that inspires trust in both roles.
Our projects come from a wide spectrum of auction worlds. The common thread: a specialist who wants to run their own flow and their own brand, rather than being a tenant on a generic marketplace.
Regular public property auctions, judicial sales, company share auctions, and land platforms for building plots or leasehold plots. With notarial integration, cadastral data, certified bids and KYC onboarding at a level that suits the value of the property.
A Sotheby's-lite for the mid-market: art, antiques, classic furniture, vintage watches, whisky, wine, sneakers or classic vehicles. With high-resolution zoom, provenance fields, condition reports and the specific VAT margin scheme that applies in the art trade.
Machinery, vehicles, warehouse surplus and complete business inventories from receivership proceedings. With fast lot intake, a photography workflow, a viewing-day planner, VAT shifting for business buyers and streamlined on-site collection handling.
Reverse auctions in which suppliers compete for a contract, sealed-bid tenders, energy and CO2 purchasing auctions, and B2B sales of surplus stock or equipment. With procurement flow, supplier onboarding and a compliance layer over the entire bidder administration.
Horse auctions, cattle, meat auctions, and flower or plant auctions. With weight categories, provenance traceability, transport coordination and integrations with the specific registers the sector requires. Often in a hybrid live and online setup with room and telephone bidders.
Digital assets, NFT collections, in-game items, or new categories such as trading cards and limited drops. With wallet integration where relevant, fraud detection against bot bidders, and a UX that doesn't feel like a property portal to digitally native bidders.
It depends on what your auction is about, how many parties take part and which compliance requirements need to be arranged around it. In the first conversation we advise which direction suits your situation.
An online auction environment for one clearly defined vertical: art, antiques, sneakers, whisky or classic vehicles. With lot catalogue, photo gallery, condition reports, viewing-day planner, online bidding and settlement flow. A recognisable brand that fits its niche and doesn't get lost among a general platform.
For property auction houses, judicial sales and curator processes. With notarial integration, certified bids, KYC checks for registrants, integration with the Land Registry and legal audit logging. Suitable for both public and private auctions, including scheduling a physical auction day with online participation.
A single platform engine serving multiple auction houses, branches or geographic markets under their own sub-brands. Each tenant gets its own branding, commission engine, payment flows and language. Suitable for SaaS providers, holding structures or international rollouts. Built on a multi-tenant architecture with central governance.
The right auction mechanism depends on what you are selling, who is bidding and how you want to shape pricing. A brief overview of the six formats we encounter most often in projects, often combined on a single platform.
The classic ascending auction in which the highest bid within the time limit wins. Suitable for the vast majority of consumer and specialist auctions: art, antiques, sneakers, classic vehicles. With anti-sniping and proxy bidding for a fair finish.
A descending-price auction in which the price falls until the first bidder accepts. Works well for goods with a clear market value where you want to force speed and bidder action. Flower auctions are the textbook example, but B2B clearance sales also lend themselves to it.
Each bidder submits one secret bid; either the highest wins and pays their own bid (sealed-bid first-price), or the highest wins but pays the second-highest bid (Vickrey, second-price). Widely used in tender processes, private real estate sales and specific art segments where disclosing the highest bid is undesirable.
A reversed flow: you put out a request and suppliers bid lower and lower to win the contract. Standard within procurement departments, B2B energy purchasing, CO2 auctions and tender platforms. Requires a separate UI and its own anti-collusion controls.
Bidders can bid not only on individual lots but also on combinations. The system calculates which combination yields the highest total return. Used for spectrum auctions, lot clusters in real estate and industrial sales where the value of the whole exceeds the sum of its parts.
An in-person auction day with a published catalogue, where online bidders take part simultaneously with room bidders and telephone bidders. The auctioneer in the room sees all streams on one screen. Requires tight synchronisation and clear precedence rules for simultaneous bids.
A production-ready auction platform with everything around it so you can manage it yourself, list lots and run new auctions without having to call us back.
With OneDayBuild, we turn your idea into something tangible in one day for €1,150, so you can see whether further development is worth the investment. Decide to go ahead with the full build? Then we credit the full cost.
Explore OneDayBuild →Four patterns in which clients come to us. If you recognise one of them, we would be happy to talk through what your own platform would deliver compared with a standard marketplace.
Catawiki and eBay are built for broad consumer auctions. If you work in a specialist niche — vintage watches, classic cars, art above a certain segment — the generic offering rarely suits your audience, your commission structure or your brand.
For property auctions, enforcement proceedings or auctions above AML thresholds, you need to be able to demonstrate who placed which bid, when, and with what identification. Standard platforms do not offer that level of control or evidence logging.
Dutch auction (descending price), Vickrey (sealed-bid second-price), reverse auction for procurement, or combined bidding in which several lots are bid on as a package — these mechanisms are rarely found on standard platforms and would need to be built for you.
Your estate agent CRM, ERP, land registry data or curator file needs to flow straight through to the auction platform. With your own platform you keep that data flow tight; with a third-party marketplace, exports and imports always lag behind the facts.
A conversation in which we understand which auction format you run, which bidder audience you serve, which compliance requirements apply, and what a typical auction cycle looks like for you — from lot intake through to collection.
A workshop with your lot managers, financial processing and the person responsible for legal matters. At the end you have the scope, the auction mechanism (English, Dutch, sealed-bid, reverse or a combination) and the first clickable screen flow.
A working build every two weeks. We start with lot management and the bidder flow, then real-time bidding with anti-sniping, and only in a later sprint the more complex integrations (payments, KYC, notarial integration). You test along with real lots in a staging auction.
We actively support the first live auction — someone from our team sits in the operations chat. After that comes a phased rollout to a wider bidder base, training sessions, and ongoing maintenance for security, scaling and extensions.
What clients usually want to know before we start.
A free, half-hour introductory call. We listen to your auction format, your target audience and the compliance you need to handle, and give direction you can genuinely use, even if the outcome is that a standard platform is sufficient for you.
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