I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search

by scarsam • 3 months ago

302 105 3 months ago

scarsam24• 3 months ago

US government auctions are scattered across at least 28 platforms. GSA sells decommissioned federal fleet. DLA Disposition moves military gear. The US Marshals front seized property through bid4assets. PublicSurplus runs school district and state-agency lots. GovDeals fronts thousands of county and municipal agencies. Fannie Mae and HUD auction foreclosed homes. None of these sites index together, and most have search UX that lost a fight with 2008.

So I scraped them all and put one search box in front. 180,276 active listings as of today, normalized into a shared schema in Postgres with full-text search. About 53,000 new listings come in every week.

A few real things you can buy this week, all live in the data:

- A 2000 Bell 430 helicopter (executive model), $250k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762

- A 1985 Cessna 182R aircraft in Missouri, $33k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430

- An M75 APC armored personnel carrier on Ritchie Bros, no bids yet: https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel...

- A Rolls-Royce ship thruster, never used, $500k starting: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144

- A 2.3 kg iridium-platinum ingot (police seizure on PropertyRoom), 52 bids, currently $175k: https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-p...

- A 1927 Seagrave fire truck, "runs, drives, and titled," $24k, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223

- A truck-mounted forklift from a manufacturer literally named "Donkey & Burro": https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632

The work that took longest wasn't the scraping (each source has its own quirky JSON or HTML), it was the dedup. The same Fannie Mae foreclosure shows up under three different addresses across three platforms. A "2008 Ford F-150" from GSA Fleet looks structurally identical to one from PublicSurplus, but they're different vehicles with different VINs, and the only way to know is to fingerprint enough metadata to make a confident match.

There's a deal score per listing (price vs category median, bid velocity, time remaining, starting-bid ratio) and SEO landing pages per state-by-category combo, mostly because long-tail government-auction queries on Google are nearly all unanswered.

Stack: Next.js, Postgres, TypeScript scrapers per source, daily refresh.

Happy to answer questions about scraping the federal sites (some of them really do not want to be scraped) or how the deal scoring works.

djmips• 3 months ago

Don't forget the Aircraft Jet Blast Deflector you've always dreamed of!

https://www.govdeals.com/en/asset/2402/13188

scarsam24• 3 months ago

That's the kind of listing that earns its CDN cache.

bbstats• 3 months ago

First thing I searched was Pokemon cards and found items with bids at 50% higher than market value...either shill bidding or folks who are bidding blindly.

reactordev• 3 months ago

Surprised you even got it to load.

yodon• 3 months ago

Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Caught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.

xnx2• 3 months ago

Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945

player_piano4• 3 months ago

Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)

rovr138• 3 months ago

Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?

834• 3 months ago

Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.

craftkiller• 3 months ago

Ah thank you for your site! Before your post, I didn't know the government auctioned off homes online and through following the links to the auctions I learned about the FHA $100 down payment program.

gavmor• 3 months ago

A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.

JumpCrisscross• 3 months ago

Cool, I just bought a school bus.

beepbooptheory• 3 months ago

Looks like that one actually works too!

godzillabrennus• 3 months ago

People are realizing lots of government data sources are free and building vibe coding apps around them...

millzlane• 3 months ago

Yea, this one had wrong and broken info all over it.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Hadn't come across govauctions.app before today. Idea came out of a weekly idea bot I run; turns out the same gap was obvious enough that two of us built for it within a few weeks. Well done player_piano!

DevX101• 3 months ago

You need to cache search queries.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Yes, queries are wrapped in unstable_cache (using Next.js) (5min TTL); the box was state landing pages doing aggregates uncached. Pre-rendered those overnight.

1970-01-01• 3 months ago

US Gov auctions are great when you want 400 of something broken or want to travel through 3 states for a $1000 mil-spec kitchen sink.

834• 3 months ago

Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.

cucumber3732842• 3 months ago

Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms. The whole point of Govdeals et al is that the seller is a known-ish quantity. If I wanted to roll the dice on garbage with fresh paint I'd be on Ritchie bros.

Govdeals managed services (or whatever they call it now) is just as questionable as 3rd party sellers on any given big bog store's ecommerce "platform".

Barbing2• 3 months ago

One of the top reasons auction hunters hate gun control

The worst ones will try to add a few extra holes the night before the auction

SilverElfin• 3 months ago

Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?

adrianpike• 3 months ago

Depends on the item and if you and the military are optimizing for the same thing It's a lowest bidder situation, so keep that in mind.

Mil-spec transport containers? Excellent.

Mil-spec rucksacks? Not so excellent.

Twirrim• 3 months ago

If you ever want knives, you can get a fascinating set of them by looking out for the TSA/Airport confiscated items auctions.

Hawaii's one is at https://auctions.ehawaii.gov/dot/welcome.html. I had a boss when I lived in Hawaii that would bid on them, occasionally brought boxes of the random "sharps" (as they were called at the time) that had been confiscated from people by TSA. Some of it is somewhat surprising that people still had on them when they got to TSA, like high quality 18" long machetes.

protocolture• 3 months ago

My backpack is a bit of a black hole. I used to get pulled up due to carrying my grandfathers pocket knife all the time.

Then as things got worse, these days its screwdrivers, wrenches etc.

Seems like soon even my ethernet cables are going to be taken from me.

sjducb• 3 months ago

Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Fixing today. Categories should render an empty state with a signup prompt rather than a blank page.

zikduruqe• 3 months ago

Can I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s

I wish I had jumped on those offers back when they were in the back of Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, and SOF magazines back in the day.

spate141• 3 months ago

Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Should be working better now.

graybeardhacker2• 3 months ago

Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong

The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Should be quicker now!

pwr1• 3 months ago

Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?

postalrat• 3 months ago

I work in the HR space and though about something similar with jobs. A bunch of recuiters will publish the same job. What I figured would be best is have one job entry and show all the recruiters who published and let you go to one of them.

kdot• 3 months ago

Missed the District of Columbia

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Just shipped DC.

perdomon• 3 months ago

Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Tuned the ISR cache, should be quicker now!

sikozu2• 3 months ago

I'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30

markdown2• 3 months ago

This looks to be a vacant residential lot for under $3k: https://bidprowl.com/listing/vacant-lot-in-santa-clarita-los...

What am I missing?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Some are real bargains, some are landlocked or carry HOA back-fees not in the listing. The good ones tend to disappear in the first hour.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Deal of the Day is whatever scored highest yesterday. Sometimes glamorous, often a golf cart.

ambicapter• 3 months ago

Search just seems broken for me. I get

Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0

on Chrome 147.0.7727.102

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Maybe some chrome extension causing this on your end?

maerF0x0• 3 months ago

I'm curious how much of this stuff is actually civil asset forfeiture? (Not to blame the site(s) for such practices, but to think about the whole ecosystem of how a government comes to have a bicycle, switch, truck etc)

https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-for...

shrubble• 3 months ago

From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.

graybeardhacker2• 3 months ago

I have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.

infecto• 3 months ago

Didn’t a site like this just show up a few weeks back on here? What is the interest in government auction sites?

pimlottc• 3 months ago

Prices are going up. People are looking for bargains.

sparrish• 3 months ago

I chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Sorry about that. State pages were doing live aggregates per request and the HN spike killed them. Pre-rendered overnight; Colorado loads instantly now.

hchak• 3 months ago

Commerce is so back!

scarsam24• 3 months ago

You bet!

bandrami• 3 months ago

I almost bought a lighthouse 25 years ago off of a GSA auction. I'm glad my bid lost because I didn't read the fine print carefully about how much the upkeep would cost.

ocdtrekkie• 3 months ago

You just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.

jcoby• 3 months ago

That’s exactly what the project lighthouse guys did.

https://youtube.com/@project.lighthouse

samorozco• 3 months ago

The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.

Unbeliever69• 3 months ago

Vibe coders don't understand concepts such as: indexing, caching, deduping, memoization, profiling, Big O, N+1 queries, lazy loading, connection pooling, pagination, re-render management, layout thrashing, virtualization, debouncing, code splitting, memory leaks, garbage collection, streaming vs. buffering, async parallelism, main thread blocking, race conditions, backpressure, request waterfalls, payload optimization, batching, round-trip costs, cache invalidation, hot path analysis, data structure selection, and countless other concepts related to performance."

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Caught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.

jjordan• 3 months ago

Any plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Easy ship. Will get state, category, and ending-soon feeds out this week.

yieldcrv• 3 months ago

Browsing is just one part, each jurisdiction and agency within each jurisdiction has its own process to even be able to join the auction

Sometimes requiring months in advance

So I want an agent that does that automatically and I don’t want to do it on my computer

AnishLaddha• 3 months ago

might just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page? i.e. https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california

edm0nd2• 3 months ago

def some price/updating lags

i saw a listing that ends in 39 minutes and was at $806

i click to be taken to the listing and its $1,270.00

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Fair. The sub-cron only refreshed lots in the next 24h. Tightened it last night: anything ending soon refreshes every 30min, and anything not seen in 48h gets re-checked. Should be much closer to source on endings now.

vatsachak• 3 months ago

Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.

Great idea though

minorj47• 3 months ago

I know they aren't states but is there a way to add Puerto Rico and the Virgin islands? I know some auction sites include them.

scarsam24• 3 months ago

On the list, in next week's batch with Guam. Feel free to drop some of the ones you would like to get included!

baby_souffle• 3 months ago

Slow, but working well.

Really needs a way to refine search results to "within X miles of $someGeoPointOrZipCode". I am seeing a lot of neat stuff in California ... but i'm not going to drive 7 hours to go pick it up :)

me_online• 3 months ago

Agree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.

____tom____• 3 months ago

Not by town, please. There are about 100 in the Bay Area. That's just useless.

Lat long of the town center would work. I don't need precise, but not seeing something 100 meters from me because it's in the next municipal unit is aggravating.

markdown2• 3 months ago

https://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-soni...

This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!

scarsam24• 3 months ago

On the list. Blocker is geocoding coverage; not all sources publish lat/long and address quality varies. Backfill in progress.

mmmlinux• 3 months ago

Oh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.

tectonic• 3 months ago

Really needs sort by distance.

qingcharles• 3 months ago

Doesn't support negative query modifiers?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Not yet. Plain Postgres FTS today. Will add -term exclusion.

kraptv• 3 months ago

Weird, the first two auction items I checked on for Oregon (sorted by highest) were already bid for and won. Is this not clearing out finished auctions?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Real bug. Adapter wasn't reading "lot closed" pages and was relying on a 7-day stale window. Tightened to 5 days plus a 30-min priority refresh on anything stale > 48h. Each adapter now flips status on the source's signal directly.

dom96• 3 months ago

Very cool, is there something similar for other countries, like the UK?

scarsam24• 3 months ago

Not that I've built. The UK has GovBuying but that's procurement, not surplus. If you know of an aggregator I'd be curious.

guest__user• 3 months ago

does anyone know if there are us gov auction sites for places overseas like military bases embassies etc ?

I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search

Related Stories