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!
They make money not by optimizing per item profit or by exploiting information asymmetry, but by getting as many eyeballs on their site as possible to drive demand (and thus drive auction price up). They’re happy to be scraped as long as scrapers don’t bring them down because their core competency is giving municipal and state governments an aggregated platform and making the process easier from a bureaucratic point of view.
If you do the work of marketing for them (especially for free!) that’s a plus in their eyes. You’re not a competitor because they do the work of actually dealing with government departments like handling payments and paperwork.
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.
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.
My dad bid on multiple LCVPs, guessing on a reasonable price for them based on what the engines were worth.
Fortunately he only won one of them. If all 4 had shown up at our house, my mom would have killed him.
Interesting aside, the casting date on the transmission housing was 1945 - but the hulls were built in 1967. Those Detroit Diesel 6-71s engines / transmissions last a long time!
In short, the people who have the money to fix it want to live somewhere nicer.
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
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).
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.
Feature request: I'd love to be able to share a search results page with a friend. If you update the url to include the location or zip code I am searching for (ex: https://www.govauctions.app/feed/12345) this would be possible.
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!
https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-4-1-QSC-I-26-240-001
https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-1-1-QSC-I-26-148-031
Unlike eBay, with traditional auctions, all the responsibility for "inspection" lies on the bidder -- you're expected to visit the item during the listed inspection times, if there are any, and make your own judgment of its worth. If there's no inspection period, then you're guessing blind with everyone else.
In this case, click through to the GSA Auctions listing, and scroll down to see the "property custodian", give them a call during the hours listed above on the page, and haul your butt out there to inspect the item.
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)
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.
I searched "volkswagen" on govdeals and found a lot of vehicles listed but nothing on this site.
If you're going to share a local website on a global site like HN at least mention the locality!?
