Why I Built a Tool to Track 12,000+ European Court Auctions

Why I Built a Tool to Track 12,000+ European Court Auctions

Six months ago, I noticed something strange.

In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, courts were selling seized real estate — apartments, commercial properties, entire buildings — at discounts of 20–50% below market value. These weren't obscure corners of the internet. They were official government auction portals, fully public.

The problem? Each country had its own portal. Different formats, different languages, different search interfaces. Finding a deal meant checking five platforms daily, translating legalese, and hoping you caught the listing before it expired.

So I built CourtBid.

It monitors 12,000+ active judicial auctions across 6 EU countries — Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary — and surfaces the ones worth looking at. One platform, one language, daily alerts.

What I learned building it:

Most "investment opportunities" in real estate require either massive capital or insider knowledge. Judicial auctions break that rule. The discounts are real. The process is public. The barrier was information — not access.

The tool is live at courtbid.eu. Still early, still rough around the edges. But it's already tracking €2B+ in listed assets across Europe.

If you're interested in proptech, European real estate, or just how judicial systems work as an accidental marketplace — this newsletter is where I'll think out loud about it.

Why judicial auctions stay invisible

The information is public, but it is not usable. Each country publishes in its own portal, in its own language, with its own field names and its own idea of what a "property description" is. There is no shared identifier, no common export, and in several portals no reliable way to filter by asset type at all. So the data exists, and almost nobody reads it — which is exactly why discounts survive there.

The second barrier is time. Listings appear and expire on court schedules, not market schedules. A buyer who checks once a week sees a different market than one who checks daily, and the difference is not effort but tooling.

What a discount actually means

A price below market value is not automatically a bargain. Judicial sales carry conditions that private sales usually do not: a deposit payable before bidding, strict payment deadlines after the hammer falls, and limited or no possibility to inspect the property beforehand. Some assets are still occupied, and eviction timelines vary widely between jurisdictions.

Encumbrances matter just as much. Depending on the country and the procedure, certain charges are cleared by the sale and others transfer to the buyer. The published starting price says nothing about that, which is why the legal file, not the headline number, decides whether a listing is worth pursuing.

How I use the data

The workflow is boring on purpose: filter by country and asset type, drop anything without a readable legal file, then check the three things that most often kill a deal — occupancy, outstanding charges, and the real cost of bringing the building back into use. For the last one, a construction cost estimate matters more than the auction price: a discount of 30 % disappears quickly when the roof, wiring and heating all need replacing.

That is also why the tool stops at surfacing and filtering. It tells you what exists and what changed today. Deciding what a property is worth still takes a site visit, a lawyer, and a builder's estimate.

Where it goes next

The current focus is coverage quality rather than more countries: better parsing of court documents, cleaner asset classification, and alerts that fire on the criteria a specific buyer actually uses. Judicial systems will keep producing this market whether or not anyone is watching — the only question is how much of it stays invisible.

Related reading: 7 estimating mistakes that cost 10–30 % of the budget (in Lithuanian).