I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.
The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.
Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
Suggestions:
Put the parameters into the url so searches can be bookmarked, like zip codes, terms, filters, and other aspects can be shared easily as well.
Description search both include (like i7, 16GB) which is good for electronics and exclude for example exclude "repair" or "needs repair" which is helpful for many things.
Category specific filters, vehicle millage range, year
Keywords classification filters like pickup, delivery, payment methods, how many days you have to pay if known, etc.
You are probably already thinking along these lines for some of them, just an encouragement to implement. Yes categorization/filters can be fuzzy(commas, which word or plurals used, etc), so feel free to put the [beta] or [experimental] tag until a recipe that gets most of the stuff works.
Thanks for building this, I bookmarked it and already shared it with a few friends.
I second the search parameters in URL. RSS feed of search page would also be great.
RSS Feeds of searches would be great, I know alerts exist, but for this community being able to get data through alternative methods, especially RSS is very appreciated.
Noted. Crazy that as I was building this I was wondering whether I should be designing it as much for agent browsing as for humans.
Very kind of you - sharing this has definitely highlighted some of the rough edges :) Search / Alert accuracy is one big thing I need to make better, and I will take note of these suggestions.
The title claims to search every platform but I don't see any evidence of either https://www.govdeals.com/ or https://www.publicsurplus.com/ which are probably the biggest government auction sites.
Hi, yes, my apologies. One thing I'm currently fixing is the workflow for bringing in many of the listings that sites like GovDeals cover but are not part of the available APIs. Scraping sites like GovDeals is kind of shady and not something I want to do, so I am ingesting and cleaning a lot of data from state/government websites myself. While I fix that, I've removed those references from the site.
This is a real public service. More people can find better deals, this increases the pool of bidders, taxpayers will get more money for the auction. Discoverability is hugely important to these auctions.
Thank you. Yes, you could definitely say that I'm undermining a personal arbitrage advantage on this corner of the Internet, but I couldn't resist trying to "fix" it and better surface all of these woefully inefficient mini-marketplaces.
Pretty cool. But a lot of it doesn't really work once you click into a particular state. For example, from this page, if you click on "All auctions in Georgia", it lists all auctions in the country. Or if you click on "electronics", it doesn't show just electronics in Georgia.
Thanks for surfacing this. Not sure why this is breaking, but I am looking into it and will fix it as soon as I can.
Update: This should now be working the intended way (ie for Georgia, showing only GA results when you click out, and filtering for the category within GA).
I like the project! Echoing that I'm seeing issues with anything from GovDeals surfacing in my area, I know there's a couple hundred auctions and only GSA Auctions came up.
Additionally, there's definitely some funkiness when it comes to how it handles current price/bid, I don't know if I saw any that were actually reporting the correct price it was currently at, always was under reported.
Thanks for sharing though, going to keep an eye on this!
Appreciate it. Some of the bugs I have been able to fix today, but these listings actually come from diverse and in some cases hard and time-consuming to parse sources. I have no intention of scraping govdeals or anything like that, which means I have to do my own ingestion and cleaning of the data.
Very interesting project! Can anyone comment on what the buying process is like? Specifically if there are any weird hoops to jump through or if it's a normal account signup and payment process. Is delivery available or do these need to be picked up in person?
It varies by state and authority. The majority require in-person pickup; for properties there is often longer, sometimes multi-stage bidding process (where the auctioneer periodically reviews current bids, and decides whether any are acceptable before moving to the next stage).
The ones I’ve looked at need to be picked up in person, sometimes with very short deadlines.
e.g. from one auction: Removal Responsibilities: The successful bidder is solely responsible for all aspects of removal, including packing, crating, banding, loading, and shipping. The agency will not provide assistance.
Authorized Third-Party Removal: The authorized third-party agent must present a Letter of Authorization from the high bidder (see terms and conditions for details), a copy of the purchaser's receipt, and a valid photo ID at the time of removal.
Special Pickup Requirements: You are required to provide your last and first name along with the specific date and time to Mimi.quach@noaa.gov for pickup. This information is required to grant you access to NOAA Building 33. Building hours are Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM.
Loading Assistance: Staff will be available to help load the item onto your vehicle.
Pickup within 15 business days.
That’s nice. Care to write technical write up? What’s the tech stack, expected load, are you planning to monetize it, etc.?
Happy to. This is a side-project, so I spun it up pretty quickly using Next.js and Tailwind, and it is hosted on Vercel right now.
I use a few free government APIs for the data (listed on the site, you can sign up for a key for free for all of them I think), plus a custom workflow I built that parses and ingests many other online auctions that states are mandated to make public, but which aren't part of any API or data pipeline I could find.
Expected load - about 1/10 of what it has seen today :) I had to scramble to make things more robust once this post became more popular, and am now looking at a few different options for hosting.
This was not really intended as a business - there is a very light "subscription" option right now, for users who want to create many alerts. I mainly wanted to try and fix this problem, share the solution, and get some feedback.
Doesn't seem accurate considering GovDeals has auctions in NY, NJ and CT listed but your website has nothing.
Yes, there's an issue with some of the auctions that are on GovDeals - I've removed all the references to those while I try and fix them.
Feature request:
Let me filter and alert based on a distance, not just sort. e.g. "Lathe" within 100 miles of Baltimore. GovDeals lets you do this, but their distance filter is very inaccurate.
You should now see this option when you create an alert - within 50/100/500 miles of a given ZIP.
If you want to see how quickly this can trap you in, watch the William Osman 2 channel on YouTube.
Will check it out once I fix a bunch the bugs people are surfacing :-)
Good stuff,
Once an item clicked back button returns you to a reset listing, so you cannot click and item go back and retain the last position you were looking at (tested on iPhone)
Update: this should be working now.
The guides mention govdeals. But I don't see them, for instance the UC davis bike auctions are not included.
Thanks. Looks like there is an issue with these listings right now - working on it.
Seems to be missing stuff.
I searched "volkswagen" on govdeals and found a lot of vehicles listed but nothing on this site.
Thank you. Looks like other people are having an issue finding these - I'm going to take the reference to these listings down until I can fix it.
The server pallet caught my attention. I wish it listed some of the basic specs, but current bid is $55.
https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-1-1-QSC-I-26-148-031
> right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000
If that's not enough for you then there's another auction too! https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-4-1-QSC-I-26-226-002
It is truly a weird and wonderful world of things you can buy out there. Last year I contemplated buying a 100-tonne crane in New Jersey, which was going for about $5,000. The only issue was that you had to go pick it up yourself...
I am looking for a 60 ft+ steel ship if you come across one.
There is a 25ft one currently at $1,550 in Montana, made from steel and comes with its own trailer! - https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-3-1-QSC-I-26-284-021
@dang player_piano is obviously a bot.
Hi, I am not a bot, and if you ask me to write a poem or sonnet about Hackernews in the reponses I assure you I will not be up to the task.