Opening a voluntary auction house (OVV) in 2026: the complete guide

Quick answer. To open a voluntary auction house (OVV) in 2026, you file a prior declaration with the Conseil des maisons de vente, prove professional capacity to direct sales, open an account dedicated to sellers' funds, take out professional liability cover and set up a financial guarantee. The licensing regime disappeared with decree no. 2023-119 of 20 February 2023.

You want to create an auction house, run public auctions of movable goods, or move an existing business towards voluntary sales. The subject comes up often in our discussions with commissaires de justice, gallery owners and experts who want to take the plunge. The good news: the path is clearer than before. But it remains tightly framed, because you will be holding other people's money. Here, in the order in which we handle them, are the points to secure before the first sale.

No, and that is the major change of recent years. Access to the activity no longer goes through a discretionary licence. Since decree no. 2023-119 of 20 February 2023, the regime created by law no. 2000-642 of 10 July 2000 has been replaced by a simple prior declaration sent to the Conseil des maisons de vente (CMV).

In practice, the operator files its declaration with the Council's services. It is registered, without an authorisation decision, as soon as the legal conditions are met. The CMV therefore no longer grants a discretionary green light: it registers, and you may operate.

Hayot Expertise tip. This shift from licence to declaration does not mean anything goes. If a substantive condition is missing (dedicated account, insurance, capacity), the declaration grants no valid right and you operate unlawfully. The control has moved downstream, it has not been lightened. Prepare a complete file, as if a licence were still required.

Directing a public auction of movable goods is not open to just anyone. Article L321-4 of the Commercial Code makes the direction of sales subject to a professional qualification: a diploma, or recognised experience, allowing the person to direct an auction.

In practice, this qualified person is most often a commissaire de justice authorised for voluntary sales, or a holder of the required diplomas. The distinction is essential for your company's governance: the auction house can perfectly well be carried by a structure with several partners, including non-qualified capital contributors, provided that within it a duly qualified person assumes the effective direction of the sales.

Two configurations come up frequently:

• The qualified professional in sole control, holding the majority and directing the sales. Governance is simple, the risk of conflict low.
• The qualified person plus investor pairing, where the capital contributor funds growth without directing the sales. This is where drafting the articles becomes delicate, as the effective direction of the sales must be locked in favour of the qualified person.

This boundary between capital ownership and direction of sales overlaps with the changes to the profession introduced by the reform that created the commissaire de justice from the merger of huissier and commissaire-priseur. Anticipating who directs, who funds and who is accountable for the funds is the first reflex to have.

This is the point we secure first in our files. Article L321-6 of the Commercial Code imposes three protections, because an auction house collects the proceeds of sales on behalf of the sellers. You are not only managing your own cash: you hold money that does not belong to you.

The dedicated account prevents any mixing of the company's cash with sellers' money. The financial guarantee, by insurance or surety, serves to represent to sellers the funds collected, should the operator default. These three items are not administrative formalities: they condition the very lawfulness of the activity.

Hayot Expertise tip. Many founders reason like an ordinary business and run sale proceeds through the company's current account. That is the mistake to avoid. Sellers' funds must stay strictly separate, on the dedicated account, and be guaranteed. It is also the first thing an audit looks at. The logic is exactly the one we describe for the commissaire de justice's accounting of third-party funds: what passes through is not turnover.

The accounting difficulty of an OVV does not lie in the complexity of the entries, but in the rigour of the separation. The proceeds of a sale collected by the auction house are not its turnover: only the commission (the seller's premium and the buyer's premium) makes up its revenue. The rest belongs to the seller and must return to them, less the agreed fees.

In our files, we systematically structure three distinct flows:

1. Third-party funds: the sale proceeds collected on behalf of sellers, held on the dedicated account, which never touch the operating cash.
2. Commissions: the seller's and buyer's premiums, which make up the auction house's true turnover and carry VAT.
3. Disbursements and advances: transport, valuations, catalogue costs, re-invoiced to the seller under the agreements.

The VAT treatment of these commissions is a topic in its own right, which we cover in our analysis of seller's premium, buyer's premium and auction VAT. An OVV that does not clearly distinguish these three types of flow exposes itself to errors in the taxable base and to a risk of mixing its own funds with third-party funds.

The activity is most often carried out through a commercial company: SAS, SARL or another form suited to your project and the number of partners. The choice depends on your governance, your director's social security status and your growth plans.

The decisive factor remains the handling of sellers' funds. Because this handling imposes the financial guarantee and the strict separation of third-party funds set out in article L321-6, the structure must be designed from the outset to trace these flows: a separate dedicated account, accounting that clearly separates the company's own funds from third-party funds, and clear agreements with sellers. We support this choice as part of our business creation in Paris offer, alongside the legal advice component for drafting the articles.

The obligation does not stop at launch. The conditions under which the continuing training obligation has been met are declared to the Conseil des maisons de vente by 31 January each year at the latest.

In other words, from the first full year of activity, you must complete your continuing training and declare compliance to the CMV before the end of January. It is a recurring deadline to put in your compliance calendar, just like a tax filing obligation. It is often forgotten in the first year, when attention focuses on the first sales.

The order of operations matters as much as the documents themselves. Here is the sequence we recommend:

1. Define the legal form of the company and draft it (articles, governance, director).
2. Identify the qualified person who will direct the sales under article L321-4.
3. Open the bank account dedicated exclusively to sellers' funds.
4. Take out professional liability cover.
5. Set up the financial guarantee, by insurance or surety, representing the funds.
6. File the prior declaration with the Conseil des maisons de vente.
7. Organise, from the first year, the continuing training and its declaration before 31 January.

A few pitfalls come up regularly in OVV creation files:

• Declaring before the guarantees are in place. A registered declaration does not cure the absence of a dedicated account or financial guarantee. The logical order is to secure everything, then declare.
• Confusing commission with sale proceeds. Only commissions are turnover. Confusing the two distorts the taxable base and the reading of profitability.
• Letting the effective direction of sales drift. If the investor calls the shots and the qualified person is only a front, the lawfulness of the activity is weakened.
• Forgetting the continuing training declaration. The 31 January deadline recurs from the first full year.

A professional qualified for voluntary sales asked us to structure a future auction house, with a capital-contributing partner. Two sticking points come up almost systematically in this type of file: drafting the articles, which must leave the effective direction of sales to the qualified person, and the accounting articulation between the company's own cash and the sellers' dedicated account.

Our conviction, forged on these files, is that sequence prevails over documents. We first settle the financial guarantee and the dedicated account, then only afterwards the declaration to the CMV. Reversing this order means risking declaring an activity whose foundations are not laid. A generic aggregator will tell you that you need a financial guarantee. It will not tell you that you must set it up before the declaration, nor how to build, from day one, accounting that never mixes your fees with the sellers' money. That is precisely where the legal security of an auction house plays out.

To go further on the accounting and tax specifics of this profession, we detail our dedicated support on our chartered accountant for auctioneers and auction houses page, where we explain how we secure the separation of funds and the day-to-day steering of an OVV, alongside our accounting services in Paris 8.