Auctions in Andorra

Andorra is a principality of eighty thousand people with its own courts, its own enforcement procedure and no EU membership, and its auction market is correspondingly compact. Every forced sale in the country is conducted by a saig — the Andorran court enforcement officer — and held in person at the Batllia, the courthouse in Andorra la Vella. There is no online bidding floor and no commercial auction house.

What comes up is what a small, wealthy, mountainous jurisdiction produces: apartments and building units, plots of land, commercial vehicles in batches, individual cars, and occasionally shares in Andorran companies. Sales are scheduled twenty minutes apart, so several lots run back to back on the same afternoon.

The mechanic to understand is the round. An Andorran auction that fails comes back as a segona and then a tercera pública subhasta, with the reserve reduced each time — the notices state which round a lot is in, and a third round is where the starting price is at its lowest. Read the notice rather than the calendar line, because forced sales here frequently offer an undivided share of a property rather than the whole of it. Everything is in Catalan, and Andorra sits outside the EU customs union, so moving a vehicle out is an import.