The Auction Aggregator Landscape: Who Covers What (2026)

We index government surplus. That is the whole of what we do: 74,000+ live listings from 58 official government sources across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Belgium, de-duplicated into one search.

It is also a narrow slice of the auction world. Resellers who source from government surplus almost always source from somewhere else too, and the questions we get most often are about the somewhere else: where do storage unit auctions live, is a pallet of returns worth buying, who lists estate sales. This guide answers those by mapping the categories we do not cover and pointing at the sites that do.

Nothing below is a competitor to us and nothing below is a recommendation to buy. It is a map. For the government corner specifically, see the government auction aggregators ranked and the 16 marketplaces and what each charges.

The categories at a glance

Storage unit auctions

Where to look: StorageTreasures, Bid13, Lockerfox

When a storage tenant stops paying, the facility can auction the unit's contents under state lien law. You typically bid on the unit as a whole, sight-unseen beyond a doorway look, which makes it the highest-variance category on this page.

Who it suits: flippers who can price a mixed lot fast and have somewhere to put it. The unit must usually be cleared within 24 to 72 hours of winning, and you take everything including the worthless parts.

How it differs from government surplus: we tell you what an item is and what comparable ones sold for. A storage unit is a sealed box by design, so no comp layer is possible. If you want the pricing certainty, this is the wrong category.

Worth knowing: the online layer is more consolidated than the list of domains suggests, and it consolidated recently. Facility-software company OpenTech Alliance took 51% of StorageTreasures in 2016 and bought the remaining 49% in 2024, then acquired SelfStorageAuction.com and Canada's iBid4Storage in November 2024, on top of StorageStuff.Bid in 2018, which now redirects to StorageTreasures. It also licenses iBidOnStorage internationally. Each brand still runs under its own name, so four of the sites a "compare the storage platforms" article will send you to are one company. Bid13 and Lockerfox operate separately and no acquisition of either has been announced. Facilities also still run live on-site auctions, and StorageTreasures lets you search for in-person sales as well as online ones, so treat any single platform as a partial view of the category rather than a complete one.

Estate sales and estate auctions

Where to look: EstateSales.net, EstateSale.com, EstateSales.org

The contents of a home sold off after a death, downsize or move. Two formats exist and they behave differently: the traditional tag sale, where a company prices everything and opens the house for a weekend, and the online estate auction, where the same contents are catalogued and bid on.

Who it suits: anyone sourcing furniture, tools, collectibles, jewellery or antiques. Depth on a single high-value item is better here than in any other category on this page, because estate companies catalogue and photograph individually.

How it differs from government surplus: government lots skew utilitarian and bulk. Estate sales skew household and individual. Very little crossover in what actually sells.

Worth knowing: EstateSales.net is the largest of the three, running since 2002 with several thousand listing companies and ZIP-radius search. Correction to what this guide said previously: it is not an independent directory. Auction Technology Group bought its operator, Vintage Software LLC, for $40 million in February 2023, which puts it under the same parent as BidSpotter and Proxibid in the industrial section below and as LiveAuctioneers in art and antiques. So the estate-sales category is not the ownership island it looks like, and "check EstateSales.net, then check an auctioneer network" can be one company twice. EstateSale.com and EstateSales.org are separate directories, so checking one of those alongside it is the real second opinion. There is still no single search that spans the category, and the online-auction side runs across general auctioneer platforms on top of that. One of those changed hands this month: AuctionZip, the long-running directory of local auctioneers that many estate and consignment auctions are listed on, became part of Liquidity Services, the GovDeals parent, on October 1, 2026.

Liquidation, pallets and retail returns

Where to look: B-Stock, Liquidation.com, Direct Liquidation

Retail returns, overstock, shelf-pulls and closeouts, sold by pallet, truckload or case. This is the closest thing to government surplus in economic shape: an organisation with goods it does not want, selling in bulk, priced to clear rather than to maximise.

Who it suits: resellers with volume tolerance and storage. Manifested loads list what is in them; unmanifested loads do not, and the discount reflects that.

How it differs from government surplus: condition disclosure is generally worse and the "customer returns" label covers everything from unopened to destroyed. Government sellers describe condition inconsistently but they are not trying to move damaged stock, which changes the risk profile.

Worth knowing: B-Stock runs official, retailer-branded liquidation marketplaces, including Walmart's and Costco's, which makes it the closest thing to an aggregator layer here. Direct Liquidation now operates under ReturnPro after a 2025 relaunch, so older write-ups describe it under a different owner.

Check the date on any list you read. This category churns faster than the others. BULQ, which appeared on essentially every "best liquidation sites" list for a decade, was shut down by Optoro on July 28, 2025 after roughly ten years, with no reason given; Optoro itself was acquired by Blue Yonder the month after. It has not reopened. Guides recommending it have not been updated, which is a reasonable signal about how carefully the rest of the list was checked.

Industrial, plant and bankruptcy auctions

Where to look: BidSpotter, Proxibid, HiBid

Manufacturing equipment, laboratory kit, restaurant fit-outs and whole-facility clearances, often triggered by a closure, insolvency or relocation. Lots run from a single lathe to an entire plant.

Who it suits: trade buyers and specialist dealers more than general resellers. Values are high, buyers are few, and knowing what a machine is worth is most of the skill.

How it differs from government surplus: the closest neighbour on this page. Government agencies sell a lot of the same categories, and a buyer sourcing shop equipment should genuinely check both. The difference is that government sales are recurring and predictable while bankruptcy sales are one-off events you have to catch.

Worth knowing: these are auctioneer networks rather than category aggregators, which means coverage depends entirely on which auction houses publish to them, with specialist machinery platforms alongside them. Before you treat them as independent alternatives: BidSpotter and Proxibid share a parent in Auction Technology Group, so checking both is less of a second opinion than it appears.

Fleet, heavy equipment and agricultural

Where to look: Ritchie Bros, IronPlanet, Machinery Trader

Trucks, excavators, loaders, tractors and trailers. The one category on this page where we already overlap substantially, because government fleet disposal is a major source of exactly these machines.

Who it suits: contractors, farmers and equipment dealers. Also the category where transport cost most often decides whether a deal is a deal.

How it differs from government surplus: it does not, much. If you are buying heavy equipment you should be searching government sources and commercial ones together. Our equipment auctions near me page covers the government half.

Worth knowing: Ritchie Bros and IronPlanet are the dominant commercial players, and have been the same company since Ritchie Bros acquired IronPlanet in 2017, with the parent now trading as RB Global. RB Global has kept buying: it completed the purchase of BigIron, the farm equipment and land auctioneer, in May 2026, so the agricultural corner of this category now sits under the same parent too. Machinery Trader and the auctioneer networks carry the rest.

The overlap with government surplus also got more direct in 2026. Since January, GSA has sold the federal government's retired cars, trucks, vans and buses through weekly IAA auctions, and IAA is an RB Global company, bought in 2023. GSA's own sale pages now send bidders to IAA's site: an October 8 sale listed 166 vehicles at 16 IAA yards across five western states, bid only on iaai.com. So a federal fleet pickup and a commercial one can now be in the same company's inventory, on the same site, in the same week.

Five companies own most of the names on this page

The single most useful thing to know about this landscape is that it has far fewer players than domains. Most of the sites above roll up into five holding companies:

This matters practically, because "shop around across a few sites" assumes the sites are independent and often they are not. Checking BidSpotter and then Proxibid is one company twice. AllSurplus is a centralized storefront pulling from across the Liquidity Services network, so a lot you saw on GovDeals will frequently reappear there rather than being a second, separate listing.

Note that the ATG row now spans three of the categories on this page: industrial (BidSpotter, Proxibid), estate sales (EstateSales.NET) and art and antiques (LiveAuctioneers). The category boundaries in the table at the top of this guide are real from a buyer's point of view - the goods, sellers and legal frameworks genuinely differ - but they are not ownership boundaries. ATG also runs a cross-listing product, atgXL, whose stated purpose is to put one seller's lots in front of buyers on more than one of its marketplaces. That is a legitimate service rather than padding, but it means a lot appearing on two ATG sites is one lot, and any count that adds them together is wrong.

Correction to what this guide said previously: GovLiquidation is no longer a separate catalogue. Its own homepage now says Government Liquidation "is now GovDeals", with accounts, watchlists and bid history moved across, and the Department of Defense surplus contract it was known for ended in 2018. If an older list sends you to both, it is sending you to one site.

The exception worth knowing is that shared ownership does not always mean shared inventory. IAA and Ritchie Bros share a parent in RB Global but sell different things to different buyers: IAA is mostly insurance total-loss and fleet vehicles, Ritchie Bros mostly working equipment. Common parent, genuinely different catalogue.

The practical rule: before concluding an item is not available anywhere, check whether the sites you compared were actually separate catalogues. This is also why de-duplication is the quality bar to hold an aggregator to. An index that counts the same lot once per brand produces a bigger headline number and a worse product.

What changed in the last twelve months

The September revision of this guide missed most of these, and the newest is less than two weeks old. In date order:

• August 2025: ATG bought Chairish, the online marketplace for vintage furniture and decor, which also owns Pamono. ATG's own results put the final price at $87.7 million. It pushes ATG further into the estate-and-antiques corner of this page.
• February 2026: ATG stayed independent. Private equity firm FitzWalter Capital made a run of takeover approaches for ATG over the winter, and on February 2, 2026 announced it had no intention to make an offer. Nothing on this page changed hands as a result, but it is why ATG headlines from January read as if it might.
• January 2026: federal fleet vehicles moved to IAA, an RB Global company, as described in the fleet section above.
• May 2026: RB Global completed its purchase of BigIron, adding farm equipment and land auctions to Ritchie Bros, IronPlanet and IAA.
• October 1, 2026: Liquidity Services bought Invaluable and AuctionZip, by acquiring their parent Auction Holdings for an $80 million base price in cash. The GovDeals parent now owns one of the largest online art, antiques and collectibles bidding platforms and the best-known directory of local auctioneers.

That last deal is the one that redraws the map. Until this month the two largest roll-ups on this page had split cleanly: Liquidity Services on government and business surplus, ATG on art, antiques and industrial auctioneer networks. With Invaluable, Liquidity Services now competes directly with ATG's LiveAuctioneers for the same auction houses and the same collectors. For a buyer, the practical effect is that "check Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers" is still two companies, but "check GovDeals and Invaluable" is now one.

How to check whether two sites are actually two sites

The ownership table above is a snapshot, and this landscape moves - five ownership changes on this page landed in the last fourteen months. So rather than memorise the table, here is the check itself, in the order that costs you the least time.

1. Read the footer. Copyright lines and privacy policies name the operating entity far more often than the About page does. "© Vintage Software LLC" on an estate-sales site is the answer. 2. Compare the checkout, not the homepage. Sites under one parent tend to share a payment flow, a buyer's-premium schedule and a terms document long before they share branding. Two sites that hand you an identical premium table are rarely coincidence. 3. Search one distinctive lot title in quotes across both. If the same lot number, seller name and photo set come back, you have found a shared catalogue rather than a second market. This is the only check that answers the question you actually care about, which is not who owns the site but whether it contains anything new. 4. Treat identical listing counts as a red flag. Two independent platforms almost never carry the same number of live lots in a category.

The reason to bother is narrow but real. Comparison shopping only works across genuinely separate catalogues, so the useful question before you conclude an item is unavailable is not "did I check enough sites" but "did I check enough companies". On this page that is a smaller number: five parents cover most of the well-known names, and the genuinely independent operators are the exception rather than the rule.

Where the boundaries actually fall

Two practical rules come out of the map above.

Match the category to what you can price. Every category here rewards the same skill, knowing an item's resale value before you bid, but they differ in whether that skill is usable. Government surplus and estate auctions catalogue individually, so you can price. Storage units and unmanifested pallets do not, so you are buying a distribution rather than an item. Neither is better, but they are different games and the second one punishes anyone who thinks they are playing the first.

Transport decides more deals than price does. Nearly everything on this page is pickup-only. A lot two states away at half the price is usually the worse buy once you have paid freight. This is why distance filtering matters more than it sounds, and it is the filter most platforms handle worst.

What we cover, plainly

We index government surplus only: federal, state, county and municipal sales across nine countries, free to search, with a free sold-price database, a free search of every past US sale and a Flip Score on strong lots backed by 315,000+ past US government auction sales. With a free account you can also just describe what you're after to the GovAuctions AI assistant, and it finds the matching lots for you.

We do not index storage units, estate sales, retail liquidation or commercial equipment dealers. If that is what you are after, the sections above point at the right layer. If you want the government half, start with the feed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an auction aggregator?

A search site that indexes listings from many auction marketplaces into one place, so you search once instead of checking each platform separately, then click through to the original marketplace to bid. It does not run auctions itself and a good one is free to search. The distinction that matters is aggregator versus marketplace: the marketplace runs the sale and charges the buyer's premium, the aggregator only helps you find it.

Is there one aggregator that covers every kind of auction?

No, and treat any site claiming to be one with suspicion. The categories are structurally separate: storage units, estate sales, retail liquidation, industrial plant and government surplus each have different sellers, different legal frameworks and different listing formats. Every working aggregator specialises in one of them. A site claiming to cover all of them is usually either a thin directory of links or a paid subscription reselling access to free public listings.

What is the difference between government surplus and liquidation auctions?

The seller and the reason. Government surplus is a public agency disposing of assets it no longer needs, mostly used: fleet vehicles, IT equipment, office furniture, seized goods. Liquidation is retail inventory that never sold or came back as a return, sold by pallet or truckload. Government lots are usually described individually and sold to clear an asset register; liquidation loads are sold in bulk and may be unmanifested. Both suit resellers, but the risk profiles are different.

Are storage unit auctions worth it for beginners?

They are the highest-variance category on this page and the hardest place to start. You bid on a unit's contents sight-unseen beyond a doorway view, you take everything including what is worthless, and you usually have 24 to 72 hours to clear it. There is no way to check comparable sold prices before bidding because you do not know what is in there. Categories where lots are catalogued individually let you learn pricing before you take on that variance.

Do you list estate sales or storage auctions?

No. We index government auctions only: federal, state, county and municipal surplus across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Belgium. Estate sales, storage units, retail liquidation and commercial equipment sit outside that scope, and the sections above point at the platforms that cover each.

Why do different auction sites show the same listings?

Because ownership is far more concentrated than the number of domains suggests, and one operator often runs several consumer-facing brands over overlapping inventory. Five companies account for most of the well-known names: Liquidity Services (GovDeals, AllSurplus, Liquidation.com, Machinio, and since October 2026 Invaluable and AuctionZip), Auction Technology Group (BidSpotter, Proxibid, LiveAuctioneers, EstateSales.NET, Chairish), Sandhills Global (HiBid, Machinery Trader), RB Global (Ritchie Bros, IronPlanet, IAA, BigIron) and OpenTech Alliance (StorageTreasures, SelfStorageAuction.com, iBid4Storage, StorageStuff.Bid). Note that this cuts across the category boundaries: ATG owns platforms in industrial, estate sales and art and antiques, and runs a cross-listing product that deliberately puts one seller's lots on more than one of its sites. AllSurplus in particular is a centralized storefront drawing from across the Liquidity Services network, so lots surface there and on GovDeals both, and GovLiquidation has been folded into GovDeals outright. Shared ownership is not always shared inventory though: IAA and Ritchie Bros share a parent but sell largely different vehicles and machines. Aggregators that de-duplicate collapse genuine repeats into one result; ones that do not show you the same lot several times and count each toward a headline listing total.

Is EstateSales.NET independent?

No. Auction Technology Group acquired its operator, Vintage Software LLC, in February 2023 for $40 million, so it shares a parent with BidSpotter, Proxibid and LiveAuctioneers. It is still the largest estate-sales directory in the US and still worth using; the point is only that pairing it with an ATG auctioneer network is not a second opinion. EstateSale.com and EstateSales.org are separately operated, so one of those is the more useful second check.

Are all the storage auction sites owned by the same company?

Not all, but more of them than the domain list implies. OpenTech Alliance owns StorageTreasures outright as of 2024, along with SelfStorageAuction.com, Canada's iBid4Storage and StorageStuff.Bid, and licenses iBidOnStorage in several other countries. Each keeps its own branding. Bid13 and Lockerfox are run separately and no acquisition of either has been announced. As with every category on this page, the number of companies is smaller than the number of sites.

Does the company behind GovDeals own Invaluable now?

Yes. Liquidity Services, which runs GovDeals, AllSurplus and Liquidation.com, completed its purchase of Auction Holdings, the parent of Invaluable, AuctionZip and RFC Auction Systems, on October 1, 2026, for an $80 million base price in cash. The sites keep their own names. Invaluable is an online bidding platform for art, antiques and collectibles auction houses; AuctionZip is a directory of local auctioneers. Neither carries government surplus as such, but both now share a parent with the largest U.S. government surplus marketplace.

Is GovLiquidation still a separate site?

No. Government Liquidation's homepage now says it is GovDeals, and existing accounts, watchlists and bid history have moved to GovDeals. Its Department of Defense surplus contract ended in 2018. Searching GovDeals covers what used to be listed there.

Where are retired federal government vehicles sold now?

Since January 2026, GSA sells retired federal fleet cars, trucks, vans and buses through weekly IAA auctions, run by zone, with vehicles sitting at IAA yards. You register through GSAFleet.gov and bid on iaai.com. IAA belongs to RB Global, the parent of Ritchie Bros and IronPlanet. Other government agencies still sell their own vehicles through GovDeals, Public Surplus and similar sites, which we index.

Which auction category has the best resale margins?

There is no category-level answer, which is why the question is a trap. Margin comes from an information advantage on a specific lot, not from the category it sits in, and every category has both underbid and overbid lots at the same time. The more useful question is which category lets you check what comparable items actually sold for before you bid, because that is where the advantage comes from. Government surplus and catalogued estate auctions allow it. Sealed storage units and unmanifested pallets do not.