Euro Auctions marks 10 years in Germany

An auction scheduled for 28 to 29 April at Dormagen, Germany, will mark 10 years on the site for Euro Auctions, the international auctioneers of industrial and construction machinery, and agricultural equipment.

Euro Auctions said that over 2,000 lots had been consigned to this sale and that with buoyant market demand for industrial equipment and over 500 bidders having already pre-registered, the total hammer price was predicted to be more than €12 million.

It added that lots included several unused machines from a large CAT equipment consignor.

When it held its first sale at the Dormagen site in March 2006, the concept met with considerable resistance from the German trade, said Euro Auctions. Today, perceptions have totally changed, it said, and auctions regularly attract around 800 bidders from across Europe at each event – either in person or via the internet.

Bram Van Den Enden, Euro Auctions’ country manager at Dormagen, said, “When we launched the Dormagen site in 2006, Germany didn’t have an auction culture, preferring to buy via the established dealer network.

“Customers were also highly sceptical of a sale being hosted by a UK operator. It took time and effort but the auction is now firmly established and attracts great interest from our global community database of regular bidders.”

Euro Auctions said the real success in the last 10 years at Dormagen had been in creating a real step change in the way business was contracted. Now, large dealership, hire operators and many manufacturers use Euro Auctions to dispose of consignments of equipment. It said that Zeppelin, the German Caterpillar dealer consigned a large quantity of equipment to the last sale and was now booking equipment for future sales.

It added that others consigning on a regular basis included rental firm Cramo, compaction specialist Bomag, and Nagel, the Liebherr dealership.

Euro Auctions said it was also seeing regular buying patterns emerge among the expanding European customer base, where a customer buys a piece of equipment from Dormagen, operates it for a few years and then resells it via an auction, often replacing it with an updated version, picked up in the same sale.