GovDeals Scraper — Surplus Auctions, Sold Prices, Fees, VINs & Photos

Extract government surplus auction lots from GovDeals as clean JSON, CSV or Excel:

• open auctions you can bid on, or
• sold lots with their final prices, for pricing comparable items.

Search by keyword, category, state, ZIP radius, seller or sale type, or paste GovDeals search and lot URLs. Optionally enrich every lot with:

• VIN, condition, meter reading and quantity;
• the full photo gallery;
• the buyer's premium, fees and estimated total cost;
• watcher count;
• payment, inspection and removal terms.

Schedule it with monitor mode to get only new lots, plus alerts when a bid changes.

Cheapest full-featured GovDeals Actor: $0.75 per 1,000 lots, or $1.50 per 1,000 with full details. No start fee beyond Apify's minimum. No proxies needed.

What you get

Group	Fields
Lot	lotId, url, title, description, category, categoryCode, parentCategory, lotNumber, inventoryId, marketplace
Status & sale	auctionStatus (active / sold), saleType (Online Auction, Buy Now, Make Offer, Sealed Bid…), buyNowPrice, audience
Bidding	currentBid (final price when sold), minimumBid, currency, bidCount, bidIncrement, hasReserve, reserveMet
True cost (details)	buyerPremiumPercent, fees (itemised), feesTotal, estimatedTotalCost
Demand (details)	watcherCount
Timing	auctionStartUtc, auctionEndUtc, secondsRemaining, isNewListing
Location	address, city, state, zip, country, latitude, longitude
Seller	sellerName, sellerAccountId; opt-in sellerContactName / Email / Phone (only when GovDeals shows them publicly)
Vehicle & equipment (details)	make, model, modelYear, vin, meterReading, meterUnit, condition, conditionCode, titleRestriction
Terms & logistics (details)	quantity, quantityUnit, shippingAvailable, paymentInstructions, inspectionInstructions, removalInstructions, specialInstructions
Photos	photoUrl, photoUrls (full gallery with details), photoCount, photoUrlsText (all URLs in one spreadsheet cell)
Monitoring	changeType (new / bidChanged), previousBid, detailFetched, scrapedAt

Unknown values are always null. The Actor never guesses. Times are ISO-8601 UTC.

Which fields you get depends on how you search. GovDeals answers category/state/price browsing and keyword, ZIP or sold searches with different engines:

Search type	Bid count & minimum bid	Description, address, coordinates
Browse open lots (no keyword, no ZIP)	✅	✅
Keyword, ZIP radius or sold	bid count only with includeDetails	only with includeDetails

Turn on includeDetails for complete rows.

Export: JSON, CSV, Excel and more

Every run's results can be downloaded from the Export button or the Apify API as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML, HTML or RSS. They can also be sent to Google Sheets, Slack, email, Zapier, Make or a webhook through Apify integrations.

Ready-made table views give clean spreadsheet columns:

• Lots
• Vehicles & equipment
• Sold results
• Costs & terms

The run's Output tab links straight to each view, the full JSON and the run summary.

photoUrlsText keeps a whole gallery in one cell, so spreadsheets don't sprawl.

Use cases

• Resellers and flippers: find underpriced equipment, vehicles, electronics and furniture near you, and compare against what similar lots actually sold for.
• Dealers and exporters: trucks, buses and heavy equipment with VINs, meter readings and condition.
• True-cost bidding: see the buyer's premium and fees before you bid.
• Alerts: schedule it hourly with monitor mode. New lots and bid changes go to Slack, email or Sheets.
• Market research: track sell-through prices by category, state, seller or sale type.

Input examples

Open pickups in Texas, ending within 48 hours

{ "searchTerms": ["pickup truck"], "states": ["TX"], "sortBy": "endingSoon", "endingWithinHours": 48, "maxItems": 200 }

Sold prices: Ford F-150s sold in the last 30 days

{
  "auctionStatus": "sold",
  "soldWithinDays": 30,
  "searchTerms": ["ford f-150"],
  "includeDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 300
}

Vehicles with full details and true cost

{ "searchTerms": ["chevrolet silverado"], "includeDetails": true, "maxItems": 500 }

Buy Now and Make Offer lots from specific sellers

{ "saleTypes": ["buyNow", "makeOffer"], "sellerAccountIds": [29908, 1147], "maxItems": 500 }

Paste GovDeals search or lot URLs

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.govdeals.com/en/search?kWord=laptop" },
    { "url": "https://www.govdeals.com/asset/10/29908" }
  ],
  "includeDetails": true
}

New lots + bid-change alerts (schedule this run)

{ "searchTerms": ["forklift"], "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true, "alertOnBidChange": true, "maxItems": 1000 }

maxItems is the total across all your search terms and URLs, which run in order.

Pricing

Pay per result. You only pay for lots delivered to your dataset.

Event	Price
Lot (list data)	$0.00075 ($0.75 / 1,000)
Lot details (VIN, gallery, condition, fees & total cost, watchers, terms…)	+$0.00075 ($1.50 / 1,000 all-in)
Actor start (once per run)	$0.00005

Set Maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when that budget is reached.

Sold mode

auctionStatus: "sold" returns closed lots (auctionStatus: "sold"), and currentBid is the final price. Results come most recently closed first and go back about a year.

• soldWithinDays narrows the window. 7, 30 and 60 days are filtered on GovDeals' side; any other value is cut exactly on our side.
• All the usual filters still apply: keyword, category, state, ZIP, price, seller and sale type.

Buyer's premium and fees

With includeDetails, open lots get:

• buyerPremiumPercent;
• itemised fees;
• estimatedTotalCost (current bid + premium + fees, excluding tax and shipping).

Most GovDeals government sellers charge no buyer's premium, so expect 0 there. Fees mainly appear on AllSurplus dealer lots (for example a $299 doc fee).

Monitor mode

With onlyNewSinceLastRun, the Actor remembers lots it already returned for the same search and filters (named key-value store govdeals-monitor) and only returns new ones (changeType: "new"). A lot is forgotten after 60 days without being seen, and changing the search starts fresh.

Add alertOnBidChange to also get previously returned lots whose current bid moved since the last run (changeType: "bidChanged", with previousBid).

Run summary

Each run writes RUN_SUMMARY to its key-value store with:

• matches per query;
• pages fetched;
• lots emitted, duplicates, filtered and previously seen;
• detail, bid-count, fee and watcher-count errors;
• bid-change alerts emitted;
• why the run stopped.

How it works / responsible use

The Actor reads the same public JSON the GovDeals website loads for any logged-out visitor:

• no login, cookies or captcha solving;
• one request at a time with polite delays, and it backs off when asked;
• it never returns bidder identities;
• seller points of contact are returned only if you turn on includeSellerContact, and only when GovDeals itself displays them publicly on the listing.

You are responsible for using the data in line with GovDeals' terms and applicable law.

FAQ

Why are some fields null? GovDeals doesn't publish them for that lot (e.g. no VIN for furniture), or they come only from the detail page and includeDetails is off.

How far back do sold prices go? About 12 months.

Does it cover AllSurplus lots? GovDeals search includes some AllSurplus (marketplace: "AD") and Network International ("NI") lots. They are returned with their own listing URL.