Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
117 points - today at 4:21 PM
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 ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
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!
Comments
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!
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
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.
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 searched "volkswagen" on govdeals and found a lot of vehicles listed but nothing on this site.
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
https://www.govauctions.app/auction/gsa-1-1-QSC-I-26-148-031