About us

Salvage — a wrecked vehicle, a damaged consignment, stock spoiled in a fire or a flood — has to be sold before a claim can be settled. For a long time in India that was done by sealed quotation and word of mouth: a handful of buyers were asked, the insurer took the best figure offered, and nobody outside that circle knew the item had been for sale at all.

This site was built to open that circle. A listing is published where any registered buyer can find it, the offers are recorded against it as they are made, and when bidding closes the result is on record — what was offered, by whom, and what was decided. An insurer gets a wider market and a defensible paper trail; a buyer gets to see what is actually for sale instead of waiting to be asked.

It is run by a practising surveyor and loss assessor, not by a technology company, and the rules on it are the ones the trade actually works to.

The project was conceptualised in 2007 by Mr Naresh K Tagotra, Consultant Engineer, Surveyor and Loss Assessor, and the site went live in 2008.

It was, frankly, ahead of the people it was built for. In 2008 almost nobody in the salvage trade carried a smartphone; a surveyor in a district town did not check a website between jobs, and a buyer who dealt in wrecks was not in the habit of bidding on one through a browser. The idea was sound and the audience had not arrived yet. Much of what the site now does without comment — photographs of every item, a clock counting down to the close, an offer placed from wherever the buyer happens to be standing — assumed a reach that took another decade to become ordinary.

Two companion ventures were built on the same reading of the problem and in the same years — stolenvehicletrackers.com and stolen.in, both for tracing and recovering stolen vehicles. Neither survived. They depended on owners, police and dealers reporting and checking vehicles against a common register, and that response never came in the numbers the idea needed. Both have since closed. The reasoning behind them has not gone away: a stolen car given the identity and papers of a written-off one is still a known trade, and it is the subject of the Team-BHP discussion cited below.

This site is the one that lasted. It has been in continuous operation since 2008, and it is still owned and run by the same person who conceived it.

The site runs two separate markets. They work differently because the sellers are different, and registration in one does not carry over to the other — a buyer who wants both needs an account in each.

INSURANCE SECTOR Salvage listed by insurance companies and by surveyors acting for them. Before a buyer can see the amounts already offered, reach the insurer's contact person, or place an offer of his own, his earnest money for that item — 15% of the expected price — must be with us and confirmed. Signing in is not enough on its own. It is a deposit, not a fee: it is held against the offer, and an offer that is accepted and then not honoured is where it comes into play.

PRIVATE SECTOR Salvage listed by surveyors, loss assessors and private sellers on their own account. Any registered buyer may bid here, verified or not. A Genuineness Certified Account is optional: it does not decide who may offer, it tells the seller the offer is backed, and a listing shows verified and unverified offers apart so the seller can weigh them himself. A seller may also list an item for information only, with no bidding at all.

An offer can only go up. A new bid has to beat your own last one on that item. There is no withdrawing a figure once it is on record.

A late offer moves the closing time. An offer in the last five minutes puts the close five minutes later, and it can happen again and again. A listing is not finished because the printed time has passed — which is why a buyer who arrives at that moment is taken to the live page and told he can still bid, rather than being shown a result.

A vehicle may stand three times over. What the papers say changes what a wreck is worth, so the same vehicle can be listed as with R/C, as R/C cancelled or none, and as R/C suspended, each at its own expected price. Each is a listing in its own right with its own bidding and its own result, and each one points to the others so that nobody bids on the wrong one by accident.

The result is on record. Once bidding closes, the offers and the outcome belong to the people with a stake in them — the seller, and the buyers who bid. Anyone else may have the full result of a single closed listing for a small fee, per listing, so that a buyer can judge a market he has not yet entered.

The questions private buyers ask most often are answered at questions private buyers ask; what the insurance sector requires is set out on its own sign-in pages. The registration routes — and which one you need — are under registering.

The site has been written about in Dare magazine, which covered it as an early Indian attempt at putting a traditional trade online. Its founder took part in the ET Now / IndiaMART Leaders of Tomorrow Awards 2013 as a participant for the North and East region.

What has mattered more than coverage is being cited by people with no connection to us. On Team-BHP, India's largest motoring community, members have twice sent others here for reference:

• In a thread on thieves using the VIN and paperwork of total-loss cars to legitimise stolen ones (October 2017), a member pointed readers to this site as “having detailed information on scrapping/salvaging damaged cars”.

• Earlier, in a thread on getting rid of a total-loss car and the paperwork it involves (July and August 2013), two members separately referred an owner to our writing on the subject when she was trying to work out what documents a salvaged car needs.

Both threads are other people's, on another website; they are linked here as they stand and nothing in them is ours.

The site is owned, maintained and controlled by Mr Naresh K Tagotra, Consultant Engineer and an IRDA-approved Surveyor and Loss Assessor in practice since 1995 — IRDA is now the IRDAI. The site is run with the support of M/S Say Technologies and the development team.

That matters for what this site is. The rules on it — earnest money before a buyer sees the offers, an offer that can only go up, a close that moves when a late bid comes in, a wreck valued differently according to its papers — are not a web designer's idea of how an auction ought to work. They are how salvage disposal is actually conducted by somebody who has surveyed and assessed losses for thirty years.

Address. F 1827, Dogra Academy Lane, Shastri Nagar, Jammu 180004.

Designed and developed at M/S Say Technologies by Mr Anil Kumar Koul (MCA) and Mr Shreesh Chandra Mishra (MCA), both of the University of Jammu, under the aegis of Mr Naresh K Tagotra.

To reach us about a listing, a registration or anything else on the site, please use write to us, or email info@isalvageauction.com.