Want to buy a military plane, some gold coins and a $7,000 house? Welcome to the strange world of Government Auctions

Somewhere in America right now, in this time of sky-high mortgage rates and inflation, the government is selling a house for $7,000.

It's a one-bedroom in Saint Louis, built in 1907, sold as-is by a federal agency that would rather be rid of it. And it's not alone. Across the country there are hundreds of government-owned homes listed under $100,000, dozens under $50,000, and a handful under $25,000. You can buy a house from the government for the price of a used car, and most people have no idea.

The government also sells seized gold coins and jewelry, decommissioned aircraft, police cruisers by the fleet, forklifts, ambulances, industrial kitchens from closed prisons, and in 2026, an entire school building for $250,000.

Despite the huge volume of bargain vehicles, electronics and real-estate, about 40% of lots get zero bids - nobody shows up at all.

Government surplus auctions are one of the last corners of American commerce where an ordinary person can routinely buy something for less than it is worth, because the competition just isn't there.

A gap that pays the rent

Every county, police department, school district, and federal agency accumulates stuff it eventually has to sell. By law most of it goes to public auction. In practice, those auctions are scattered across hundreds of obscure agency websites that almost nobody checks.

Anything with an obvious resale market - iPhones, popular truck models, brand-name tools - gets found and fought over. A pallet of 125 iPhones in our data drew 248 bidders. Everything else clears for a fraction of its value, or does not sell at all. A used Husqvarna riding mower went for $10, to the one person who bothered to click.

The people who do this for a living work that second bucket. They buy the $10 mower, replace a belt, and list it for $400. They buy the pallet nobody noticed. It is a quiet but real corner of the side-hustle economy: the resale world already runs on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and government surplus is the underexploited supply feeding into it. The barrier is knowing where the auctions are.

Where the competition actually is

Bidding is not spread evenly. When we mapped roughly 36,000 US government auctions by how many bids each lot drew, the heat concentrated hard in Texas, the Midwest, and the South.

Brownwood, Texas averaged 37 bids per lot - the hottest cluster in the country. Bloomington, Illinois ran 13 bids per lot. Spartanburg, South Carolina, 10. These are mid-size towns where a critical mass of buyers has learned the game and now competes against each other.

These regions churn out exactly the lots that resell well close to home - county and school-district fleet trucks, farm and shop equipment, work vehicles - and they have deep benches of local resellers who already know to check. In the big coastal metros the surplus skews thinner and the specialist buyers are fewer, so the same lot often draws a shrug.

Why so cheap?

It's cheap for a boring reason: the seller is not trying to make money. A county does not run a marketing budget for its old dump trucks. A federal agency holding a foreclosed home in Toledo, listed at $7,500 and built in 1877, is not staging it for Instagram. They list where the law requires, wait the minimum time, and take what they get. The absence of a motivated seller is exactly what creates the opening for a motivated buyer.

There is a catch though, the cheapest homes are rough, sold as-is, and the smart buyers budget for repairs and inspect before they bid. The same discipline applies to a $10 mower or a pallet of phones. The edge is not that the stuff is free of problems. The edge is that so few people are looking that the price never gets bid up to what the item is actually worth.

Closing the information gap

That last problem - hundreds of agencies, no single place to look - is the one we're solving. GovAuctions.app pulls government auctions and government surplus auctions from across the country into one searchable feed, with sale-price history on tens of thousands of past lots so buyers can see what things actually go for before they bid.

The 40% zero-bid rate is not dropping to zero any time soon. There is too much surplus and too little attention. But every lot that gets found is one less deal left on the table - and, for the person who found it, a mower, a pallet of iPhones, or a $7,000 house that nobody else showed up for.

You can explore the full research behind this piece in our government surplus research hub, or browse live government auctions to see what is selling right now.