John Pye Auctions sells, through online public auctions, assets arising from insolvency and restructuring cases and from finance houses. The head office is in Nottingham and sales run from several centres in England and Scotland. Collection from that kind of location follows different rules from collection at a permanent auction yard: the assets stand where the failed business operated, and the time available to remove them is often counted in days.
Where the sales run
The head office is in Nottingham. Further centres are Marchington, Birmingham, Chesterfield and Bo’ness near Edinburgh, and beyond Britain also Zaragoza in Spain. The business assets department, which handles industrial equipment and machinery, runs sales from the Pinxton location near Nottingham, on Brookhill Road at the Brookhill Industrial Estate. On top of that come auctions held directly at premises being wound up.
Why this differs from an auction yard
A permanent auction yard has staff, a weighbridge, hard standing and somebody to sign the release. At a site being cleared, those things are usually missing, and in their place appear:
- A hard deadline to vacate. The insolvency practitioner hands the unit back to the landlord on a fixed day. After that day nobody will let a driver in, invoice paid or not.
- No power. Supply to the unit is often disconnected, so the overhead crane, the roller shutter and the electric forklift do not work. Loading then has to be brought in from outside.
- No staff. There are no employees who know the machine. Nobody can say where the lifting points are or whether the machine is bolted to the floor.
- Dismantling on the buyer. For permanently installed equipment the buyer is usually responsible for disconnecting services and getting it out of the building. This is exactly the clause to read carefully in the conditions of sale.
- Nobody to sign. If no authorised person is on site, the consignment note goes out without a consignor signature, and in a later dispute that is a problem for the carrier and the buyer at the same time.
What to settle before you buy
- The exact site address, not the town in the headline. Assets from one insolvency can sit in two units a hundred kilometres apart.
- The final date for vacating the premises and the hours during which a vehicle can get in.
- Who provides loading and whether equipment of adequate capacity is on site; if not, where it is brought in from.
- Whether the machine is bolted down, connected to services, or full of oil or coolant.
- Whether an articulated vehicle can reach the unit, or whether the equipment has to be shuttled out on a smaller vehicle to a transhipment point.
Clearance on insolvency assets
The customs route is the same as for any import from the United Kingdom: export clearance on the British side, import clearance in Poland, an EORI number, the tariff code and a customs value based on the price paid. The auction invoice is the core document. With assets from formal proceedings it is worth establishing early with the customs agency who appears as the exporter, because a company in liquidation is not always able to fill that role. The documentary context is in our articles on the importer’s document practice and on customs representation.
How we handle it
A site clearance rarely fits into one vehicle and one visit. More often we run a multi-point collection and take anything that does not fit the departure schedule into our own warehouse in Milton Keynes. There we handle pallet receipt and release, short-term storage, cross-docking, repacking and cargo inspection and recovery, and consolidate pallet batches into a single departure. That way the hard deadline to vacate a unit in England stops being the same date as delivery in Poland. More in the description of the Milton Keynes warehouse and in our article on collection from any location in the UK.
What we will not quote
Buyer’s premiums, removal deadlines, storage charges after the deadline or the opening hours of individual sites. On disposals from formal proceedings these conditions are often tighter than at ordinary auctions and are set separately for each sale. The terms of the individual auction are the only reliable source.
Sources
- John Pye Auctions: list of auction locations
- John Pye Auctions: auctions of assets from insolvency proceedings
Found equipment in an English site clearance? Send the site address and the vacating date through our contact form and we will build the collection around that date. See also our guide to the UK auction market.
