Industry Auction Signals: Plant Closure & Liquidation Sales

One signal per industrial auction newly listed by six US liquidation houses — Heritage Global Partners, CIA Industrial (Cincinnati Industrial Auctioneers), Heath Industrial, Schneider Industries, Loeb Equipment and Rosen Systems — with the seller, the reason for the sale, industry tags, the sale date, the location, the lot count and the catalog link. Toggle industries (cannabis, brewery/distillery, biotech lab, printing, metalworking, food, plastics, trucks …) or pass a keyword, and get only the auctions that matter to your buyers. Keyless, stateless, pay per signal.

The houses publish each auction as a WordPress post; this Actor reads their public JSON index (/wp-json/wp/v2/auction) for the auctions posted in your window, opens each auction's own page once, and extracts the header block the house itself wrote: sale date, address, "Plant Closed" / "By Order of the United States Bankruptcy Court" / "Owner Retiring" / "Surplus to the ongoing operations of" lines. Nothing is inferred from menus, sidebars or lot lists. Individual debtors' and estate sales are never emitted; cancelled sales are skipped.

Input

field	type	default	what it does
industries	select (multi)	[] = all	Keep only auctions tagged with any of these: cannabis, brewery-distillery, food-beverage, printing, plastics-rubber, metalworking-cnc, fabrication-welding, woodworking, stone-ceramics-glass, pharma-biotech-lab, semiconductor-electronics, data-center-it, packaging, automotive-aerospace, construction-heavy-equipment, material-handling-warehouse, trucks-fleet, medical, textiles-apparel, paper-converting, chemical-processing, waste-energy-utilities, restaurant-retail, entertainment-fitness, media-av, office-furniture, electrical-contractor, plumbing-hvac-contractor, automotive-repair, steel-service, agriculture.
keyword	string	""	Case-insensitive substring filter on title, headline, seller, reason and industry tags ("injection mold", "Pfizer", "bankruptcy", "plant closure").
sinceDays	integer 1–180	30	Auctions posted by the houses within the last N days. Sale dates can be weeks ahead of the posting.
houses	select (multi)	all six	hgp, cia, heath, schneider, loeb, rosen.
maxSignals	integer	200	Stop after this many signals.
proxyConfiguration	proxy	Apify datacenter	All six houses answer datacenter IPs; failed proxy attempts are retried directly.

Output — one record per auction

{
  "id": "cia:20082",
  "kind": "auction-listed",
  "house": "CIA Industrial",
  "title": "Puck Plastics",
  "seller": "Puck Plastics",
  "sellerConfidence": "inferred",
  "reason": "plant-closure",
  "reasonConfidence": "verified",
  "reasonEvidence": "house term: Plant Closed",
  "industries": ["plastics-rubber", "material-handling-warehouse"],
  "houseCategories": [],
  "location": { "city": "Shawnee", "state": "KS" },
  "otherLocations": null,
  "status": null,
  "saleDate": "2026-12-03",
  "saleMonth": null,
  "saleDateCue": "date line",
  "biddingOpens": null,
  "postedAt": "2026-10-29T16:18:42",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-11-05T12:01:10",
  "lots": null,
  "bidPlatform": "bidspotter",
  "headline": "Startup Plastic Injection Molding Facility Featuring (2) 2025 – 716 Ton JSW Injection Molding Machines, Robots, Chillers, Blenders …",
  "slug": "puck-plastics",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.cia-industrial.com/auction/puck-plastics/",
  "observedAt": "2026-11-12T13:50:00Z",
  "confidence": "verified",
  "whyItMatters": "CIA Industrial listed “Puck Plastics” (plant closure) in Shawnee, KS; sale 2026-12-03; plastics-rubber, material-handling-warehouse. Startup Plastic Injection Molding Facility …",
  "source": "cia",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-12T13:50:00Z"
}

• kind — auction-listed, or negotiated-sale for "buy now" / "for immediate sale" / turnkey offerings without a bidding date.
• reason — plant-closure, bankruptcy, receivership, assignment-for-benefit-of-creditors, secured-party, owner-retiring, relocation, real-estate-sold, surplus-ongoing, consignment, or null when the house states none. reasonConfidence is verified when the house's own term or sentence says so (reasonEvidence quotes it, ≤ 300 chars).
• seller — the company named in the title ("Ron Jones Electric, Inc.", "Schwebel Baking Company"); null for anonymised sales ("Fortune 1000 Company's Engineering Toolroom"), multi-seller consignment sales and product-named sales. Always inferred. The URL slug often still names a seller the house later anonymised.
• industries — the house's own category plus keyword packs applied to the title and headline only, strongest first (at most four). Empty when nothing matched.
• confidence — verified when both a sale date and a location were read from the page; inferred otherwise (date TBD, month-only, state-only).
• status — Heath Industrial's own label (active, upcoming, completed); other houses do not print one.
• saleMonth — month precision when the house prints "Late December 2026" or "January 2027" instead of a day.

Copied text is limited to the house's headline sentence (≤ 300 chars) and the reason evidence; contact e-mails and phone numbers are redacted.

Pricing

$0.15 per signal + $0.005 per run (Store discounts on). Auctions outside your filter, cancelled sales and individual-debtor sales are read but never charged. A 30-day sweep of all six houses ≈ 35 signals ≈ $5.25; a weekly cannabis or brewery watch is usually $0.30–1.50; a one-signal agent lookup is $0.155.

Speed (measured 2026-11-12, datacenter proxy)

run	signals	requests	time
one cannabis signal, 150 days	1	36	14 s (first record 7 s)
HGP biotech lab surplus, 30 days	6	9	5 s
brewery + food, 90 days, six houses	11 of 107 auctions	113	87 s
bankruptcy keyword, Heath + Rosen, 60 days	12 of 35	37	55 s
every auction, six houses, 60 days	76 of 81	90	72 s, 0 failed, 0 blocked

Rosen Systems is read one page at a time, two seconds apart (its server resets concurrent connections), so Rosen-heavy runs are slower.

Monitoring recipe

Run weekly with sinceDays: 7 and the industries you buy in; every record id is stable (<house>:<post id>), so a scheduled run plus mdcurt/dataset-diff-monitor on the dataset gives you only the auctions that are new since the last run. For a monthly digest, sinceDays: 30 and download the dataset as CSV (house, title, seller, reason, industries, location, saleDate, sourceUrl).

Tutorials

• Cannabis cultivation and extraction equipment at liquidation houses: industries: ["cannabis"], sinceDays: 90 — on 2026-11-12 that returned SSAC Corp (Verdi, NV — Mobius processing line, LED grow lights; HGP, Dec 15) and RC Brown Associates (San Jose, CA — HVAC, trimming, filling; HGP) and Schneider's multi-location cannabis equipment auction.
• Plant closures and court-ordered sales across all industries: keyword: "bankruptcy" or keyword: "plant closure" with sinceDays: 30.
• Biotech lab surplus (the single biggest stream: HGP lists several a week in Hayward, San Diego, Boston and the Research Triangle): industries: ["pharma-biotech-lab"], houses: ["hgp"].

For AI agents

Pass one thing: industries (an array of the tags above) or keyword; everything else has a default. You get back an array of auction signals (fields above), newest posting first per house, each with a sourceUrl you can open and a one-sentence whyItMatters. A one-signal lookup (maxSignals: 1) costs $0.155 and answers in about 5–15 seconds; a 30-day industry watch costs well under a dollar.

Limitations (stated honestly)

• Six houses, chosen because they publish a structured public index; BidSpotter, HiBid, Proxibid, GovDeals, Liquidation.com and the aggregators are not read (bot protection or robots rules). Lot-level data is never read — this is one record per auction.
• The houses edit and rename posts after publishing (CIA anonymised "Puck Plastics" into "Startup Plastics Facility" within a day; Heath pages flip to "Completed"). Records reflect the page at run time; postTitle keeps the index title when it differs.
• Industry tags are keyword packs on the title and headline, verified at 18/20 and 19/20 on two hand-checked draws of 20 (90–95 % precision); a 3D-printing shop still tags as printing. Treat the tags as a filter, read the headline before bidding.
• Sale dates come from the house's header; a date more than 400 days before the posting is dropped (repurposed pages). Multi-day sales appear once per day post (Day 1 / Day 2) as the houses post them.
• Volume: ≈ 35 auctions a month across the six houses (177 in the 150 days to 2026-11-12). This is a precise, low-volume feed, not a lot scraper.

Changelog

• 1.0.0 (2026-11-12) — first release: six houses, 31 industry packs, 10 reasons, per-house header parsers, individual-debtor and cancelled-sale filters, contact redaction, pay per signal.