After ten years obsessed with government auctions, I built the price-guide and bid assistant that didn't exist

Right now the US government is selling a decommissioned hospital. Also a couple of 1970s Beechcraft warplanes, some seized gold coins, a police-seized Escalade, and a one-bedroom house in Saint Louis that'll probably go for around $7,000. It's all legal, it's all public, but hardly anyone is bidding.

I've been obsessed with this stuff for about ten years. It started when I realized you could buy seized luxury goods, precious metals and seized sports cars straight from the government. The market is wildly inefficient, though; a used iPhone goes for near retail on one platform and a quarter of that on a county surplus site three states away. A used Husqvarna riding mower goes for $10 to the one person who bothered to click. Across a big sample of completed sales, about 40% of lots get zero bids at all.

There is no big secret, it's just the government has more of an incentive to get rid of the stuff than make a profit, and low visibility plus the hassle of pickup and transportation mean that the price rarely gets bid up to what the thing is actually worth.

Today, GovAuctions.app tracks 40,000+ live listings across 28 platforms and four countries, refreshed daily. What professional resellers care most about, though, is conspicuously absent from the main platforms: is a given listing a good deal at the current price. Most of the platforms aren't incentivized to provide this information, because their revenue is directly tied to the final bid price.

So I archived the final prices of more than 100,000 completed sales and used them to grade live lots, a 0 to 100 Flip Score backed by real comparable sales. Basically a Kelley Blue Book for government surplus, which as far as I can tell never existed before.

There were a few parts that turned out to be genuinely difficult to build, but by far the hardest were search quality (de-duping similar items, de-ranking lots with significant damage or issues), and then ranking and pricing each item reliably. Those are still the things I spend most time on today.

Valuing a used pickup is relatively easy - there are thousands of comparable sales and everyone agrees what a truck is. But what about a truck that needs coolant repair, or one with an engine leak, or one where no damage is listed, but it looks dinged up on the photo? Then there are decommissioned hospitals, or pallets of random unlabeled office gear, or a single lot of mixed jewelry, or gold coins where the melt value is a floor but the collector premium frequently fluctuates.

Each category breaks the ranking in a different way, and a deal score that's confidently wrong is worse than not having one at all.

The strange geography of who bothers

The data that comes out of all this is surprising and often counterintuitive, so I've started writing some of it up. One thing I didn't expect: bidding isn't spread evenly across the country. When I mapped roughly 36,000 auctions by how hard each lot got bid on, the competition clustered in Texas, the Midwest, and the South.

Brownwood, Texas averaged 37 bids per lot, the hottest spot in the country. These are mid-size towns where enough people have quietly learned the game that they now compete against each other, while a similar lot in a big coastal metro often draws a shrug. I also mapped where you can buy the cheapest houses in America, which turned into one of the most-read things I've published.

The bidding still happens on the government platforms, and GovAuctions.app is the intelligence layer that tells you what something's worth before you bid.

Anyway, that's the thing I spent ten years wanting to exist and finally built. Always interested in hearing from anyone who's built something in a similarly messy domain, and especially if you've bought something genuinely weird from the government. What did you end up with?

You can dig into the numbers in the government surplus research hub, or browse live government auctions to see what's on the block right now.