Looking for a half-price digital camera to take on holiday this summer? Or a cheap iPod for the children?

Well you could get three iPod Nanos for under £100 or a Nikon camera at half the retail price, and they needn’t have fallen off the back of a lorry.

In the latest sign that the credit crunch has led to a renewed appetite for thrift, savvy consumers are snapping up cut-price goods from insolvency firms and auction houses, which offload possessions from businesses or individuals who have gone bust.

Auctioneers are reporting their best year ever for sales, with profits even higher than in the 1990s when repossessions were rife, according to the National Disposals Agency, the industry body.

Top-of-the-line TVs and laptops are going under the hammer at a fraction of the normal price as recovery agents dump stock on auction houses.

John Pye & Sons of Nottingham, one of Britain’s biggest auction houses, has seen a 32% increase in sales in the past year, while profits were up 43%.

The firm has sold more than 120,000 lots in the past 12 months, including plasma TVs, iPods, Sony TVs, Nintendos, satellite navigation systems, laptops, cars and vans repossessed from homes and businesses.

In many cases, the goods come from companies that have gone bust and personal insolvencies, although in others the stock is from solvent retailers that have simply failed to sell their products.

Sheldon Miller, the business development manager at John Pye, said: “Auction houses are a reliable barometer of leaner economic times — in the past six months we have seen a big rise in individual customers attending the auctions, compared with trade buyers.

“This has been our biggest growth year since we were founded 40 years ago.

“While 2004-6 were fairly quiet for the insolvency sector, we saw an increased trickle of cases last summer and since Christmas it has increased to a wave of instructions. We have been literally inundated with cases.”

Research from Capital Economics, a consultancy, last week showed that households are being forced to spend more of their income on essential expenses than at any time since 1991. The average household spends 31% of its income on mortgage or rental charges, utility bills, food shopping and council tax, leaving less for “non-essentials”.


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