Ghost money
We tracked 409 real government auction lots from the gavel to the open market. The bid on the left is what the government got. The bar on the right is what the item was actually worth. The climb in between is money nobody in the auction room could see — until someone resold it.
Each line is one real, closed government auction lot — left point: the winning bid (acquisition cost), right point: an independently-validated open-market resale value. Both axes share one logarithmic scale, so a flat line would mean break-even. The gold line is the median receipt — $430 at the gavel, $1,280 at resale. Every line climbs because every line is a receipt: a lot we rated Buy that then sold below a trusted resale estimate.
Most of the ghost money hides in the heavy stuff
The shape isn't random. A pallet of office monitors or a lot of network switches resells for a few hundred dollars more than it cost at auction — real money, but shallow climbs near the floor of the chart. The steep lines, the ones that rocket up the right-hand side, are almost all heavy equipment and commercial trucks: a retired loader, a dump truck, a fire apparatus. Just under a quarter of the lots we tracked were exactly that — but their gaps still hold three-quarters of the money.
Median gap across 310 lots — laptops, printers, kitchen and networking gear. Priced against eBay-sold and retail comps. Steady singles, not home runs — but the median consumer lot still resold for 3.1× the bid.
Median gap across 99 lots — loaders, dump trucks, fire apparatus. Priced against realized equipment-auction sold comps. The fat right tail of the chart, topping out at a +$53,600 wheel loader.
Nearly half the lots (190 of 409) resold for 3× or more of what they sold for at auction. That's the spread a reseller works with — before transport, buyer's premium and repairs.
These are receipts — not cherry-picks
Every line climbs, which is fair to be suspicious of. So here's exactly what you're looking at: these 409 lots are our "receipts" — lots GavelGap rated Buy or Strong Buy while they were live, that then closed below a resale estimate from a source we trust. They are, by definition, the wins. We publish them because anyone can check the math against the real auction pages.
That doesn't mean we hide the misses:
What counts as a trusted resale value
The whole product rests on not confusing the auction price with the resale price. A valuation that just predicts the hammer price would erase the very gap this chart is about. So a lot only earns a line here when its resale value is anchored to an independent market:
- Equipment auction sold comps — realized prices from the heavy-equipment resale market (not GovDeals' own floor).
- Retail price comps — live merchant pricing for consumer & IT goods, discounted to a used-resale figure.
- eBay sold comps — what comparable items actually sold for on the open market.
- MarketCheck VIN valuation — VIN-and-mileage vehicle values.
The conservative GovDeals-history floor and loose keyword matches never qualify — if we can't verify the resale number against an outside market, the lot doesn't get a line. See the full receipts methodology →
How this was built
Every line is drawn from GavelGap's own receipts table: closed GovDeals lots we rated Buy or Strong Buy off a trusted resale source, that then sold below that estimate. The figures here cover all 409 receipts published to date (closes from early May through late June 2026), verified directly against the live database when this page was built.
This is a snapshot of our tracked dataset, not a census of all U.S. government surplus — GovDeals is one (large) marketplace, and these are the lots we both called and could independently value. The "gap" is the spread between the validated resale estimate and the winning bid; it's measured before buyer's premium, transport and any refurb, so it is the reseller's working spread, not guaranteed net profit. Resale figures are market estimates, not guaranteed sale prices, and auction pages can expire or relist. None of this is financial advice.
See the gap before you bid
GavelGap scores live GovDeals listings against real resale comps as you browse — so you can spot the climb while the lot is still open, not after someone else has resold it.