A "flip score" built on auction prices is grading the wrong number.
Plenty of tools will score a government-auction lot by comparing your bid to past auction results. It sounds like resale analysis. It isn't. The past auction price is what people paid to acquire the item — the cost side. A reseller's profit is open-market resale minus landed cost, so a score anchored to the hammer price is, by construction, blind to the one number that decides whether a lot is worth flipping: the gap.
The auction price
What the lot sold for on GovDeals. This is your acquisition cost — the floor you build profit on top of. A model trained on past final bids is predicting this.
cost sideThe resale value
What the item actually sells for on the open market — eBay sold comps, dealer, private party. This is what your profit is measured against, and it sits above the hammer on a real deal.
profit sideFrom our public receipts — Buy-rated lots that closed below a resale estimate from a trusted source. The same closing data, reframed: auction price vs. real resale.
A tool that calls the auction price the lot's "value" would report roughly the left-hand number on every one of these — and you'd never see the gap.
Loading verified lots…
→ See the full running ledger on the receipts page.
Why you can trust these numbers (and the honest caveats)
Every lot above is a real GovDeals close whose winning bid landed below a resale estimate from a source we trust — and each links to its auction page so you can check it.
- Resale from trusted sources only. MarketCheck VIN-and-mileage valuations (vehicles), realized prices from the equipment sold-comp pool (heavy trucks & machinery), live retail comps discounted to used-resale (consumer goods), and eBay sold comps from extension scans. The GovDeals-history floor and loose keyword guesses never qualify.
- The multiple is the headline, not a dollar swap. This sample skews toward trucks and equipment, where the auction-to-resale spread is widest; small-ticket consumer lots show a smaller absolute gap but a similar multiple. Read it as "resale runs well above the hammer," not "every category clears 2×."
- The gap is pre-cost. It's the spread before buyer's premium, transport and refurb — the room a reseller works with, not guaranteed net profit.
The point isn't the exact multiple — it's the direction. Calibrate a "flip score" to past auction prices and it will quietly track the acquisition cost, telling you how you'll do at auction rather than what the item is worth. The whole job of a resale-arbitrage tool is to measure the gap those scores erase.
Honest caveats: a resale estimate is a model of what comparable items sold for — condition, title status and local demand still matter. GovDeals links can expire or relist after a sale. None of this is financial advice; it's the same math the GavelGap extension runs on every listing, kept honest in public.
See the resale gap on every lot — while it's still live.
GavelGap reads each GovDeals listing, pulls an eBay sold-comp resale estimate and your landed cost, and shows the profit gap right in the sidebar. Free.
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