Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945</a>
Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (<a href="https://govauctions.app" rel="nofollow">https://govauctions.app</a>) and wondered what was going on :-)
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.
Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.
A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.
Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?
I am still on Vercel (yes I know, trying to migrate off...) and it gives you automated alerts when there are anomalous traffic spikes. Funnily enough, I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.
> I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.<p>I hope you're adding some fictitious entries (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry</a>) to track where those scrapes might be going.
Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.
Cool, I just bought a school bus.
Looks like that one actually works too!
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)<p><a href="https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-forfeiture/" rel="nofollow">https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-for...</a>
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.
From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.
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.
Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
One of the top reasons auction hunters hate gun control<p>The worst ones will try to add a few extra holes the night before the auction
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.<p>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".
Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?
Oh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.
Slow, but working well.<p>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 :)
Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
def some price/updating lags<p>i saw a listing that ends in 39 minutes and was at $806<p>i click to be taken to the listing and its $1,270.00
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.
Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.<p>Great idea though
You need to cache search queries.
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.
The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.
Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death.
"Oops
Something went wrong<p>The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment.
"
Any plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.
might just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page?
i.e. <a href="https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california" rel="nofollow">https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california</a>
I'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. <a href="https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30" rel="nofollow">https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30</a>
Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.
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?
Didn’t a site like this just show up a few weeks back on here? What is the interest in government auction sites?
I chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?
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.
Search just seems broken for me. I get<p>> Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0<p>on Chrome 147.0.7727.102
Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?
Missed the District of Columbia
Browsing is just one part, each jurisdiction and agency within each jurisdiction has its own process to even be able to join the auction<p>Sometimes requiring months in advance<p>So I want an agent that does that automatically and I don’t want to do it on my computer
Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling
Commerce is so back!
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.<p>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.<p>A few real things you can buy this week, all live in the data:<p>- A 2000 Bell 430 helicopter (executive model), $250k starting, 0 bids: <a href="https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762" rel="nofollow">https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762</a><p>- A 1985 Cessna 182R aircraft in Missouri, $33k starting, 0 bids: <a href="https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430" rel="nofollow">https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430</a><p>- An M75 APC armored personnel carrier on Ritchie Bros, no bids yet: <a href="https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel-carrier/15014367" rel="nofollow">https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel...</a><p>- A Rolls-Royce ship thruster, never used, $500k starting: <a href="https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144" rel="nofollow">https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144</a><p>- A 2.3 kg iridium-platinum ingot (police seizure on PropertyRoom), 52 bids, currently $175k: <a href="https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-pt10-2321-5g/18601461" rel="nofollow">https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-p...</a><p>- A 1927 Seagrave fire truck, "runs, drives, and titled," $24k, 0 bids: <a href="https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223" rel="nofollow">https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223</a><p>- A truck-mounted forklift from a manufacturer literally named
"Donkey & Burro":
<a href="https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632" rel="nofollow">https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Stack: Next.js, Postgres, TypeScript scrapers per source, daily refresh.<p>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.
[flagged]
[dead]
Can I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s<p>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.
[dead]