Us Auctions MCP Server

@pipeworx/us-auctions

Live US auction lots from both halves of the market — roughly 1,900 commercial auction houses and every reachable government surplus, seized and tax-deed source — searchable by keyword, state or distance from a ZIP, plus the sold prices auction sites delete when a lot closes.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1481+ live data sources.

Tools

• us_auctions_search(keyword?, state?, asset_type?, segment?, source?, auction_house?, near_zip?, radius_miles?, max_price?, closing_within_hours?, limit?) — the general lot search. Pass near_zip and results come back ordered by distance with distance_miles on each row.
• us_auctions_closing_soon(...) — the same pool ordered by soonest close, with hours_remaining. Answers "what can I still bid on".
• us_auction_events(state?, keyword?, auction_house?, closes_after?, closes_before?, min_lots?, limit?) — the sales themselves rather than the lots. "What auctions are happening near me next week."
• us_auction_houses(state?, keyword?, limit?) — which auctioneers we cover and how much each has live, ranked by lot count. Feed a name back into the two tools above.
• us_auctions_sold_comps(keyword?, asset_type?, state?, segment?, limit?) — min / median / average / max realized price plus recent examples. The differentiator.
• us_auctions_coverage() — per-source counts, open sale count, retained comps, per-source last-refresh time.

Auth

Keyless to the caller. The gateway injects the pack's data credentials per call; the pack itself is stateless and holds no secret.

Relationship to the neighbouring packs

• gov-auctions — the same store filtered to segment='government'. Kept separate because it is published to npm and the MCP Registry under that narrower contract, and a caller asking for surplus pickup trucks must not start getting estate-sale antiques.
• gsa-auctions — the live GSA federal-surplus API. Not DB-backed, so its lots are not in this store and do not appear here.

Data sources

Ingested by workers/auction-scraper (one adapter per source, cursor-resumed across cron firings). See that worker for the per-source traps.

• hibid — commercial. GraphQL, unauthenticated. ~1,900 US auction houses.
• govdeals, allsurplus — state/local and business surplus. allsurplus also covers govliquidation.com and go-dove.com, which are the same catalogue served under different domains — do not build adapters for those.
• publicsurplus, bid4assets, irs, txauction — the rest of the government half.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover the hard way

• Aggregate functions and group= are DISABLED on this project (PGRST123). There is no count(). Exact counts come from Prefer: count=exact and the Content-Range tail; the per-house rollup in us_auction_houses is computed in the pack over a bounded row pull, not by the database.
• final_price > 0, never merely not.is.null. The close-out sweep freezes final_price from the last known bid, and a commercial lot that drew no bids freezes at zero. Counting those as comps drags every median toward $0 while the response still looks perfectly well-formed.
• Event dates are LOCAL CALENDAR DATES, not instants. closes_on / starts_on are dates because HiBid publishes sale times with no timezone. Lot-level closes_at IS a true instant (derived from a countdown), which is why closing_within_hours keys off lots and us_auction_events off dates. Don't "fix" this by parsing the local string — that silently shifts evening West-coast sales onto the next day.
• The unfiltered search is two queries, not one or=. Ordering by closes_at while OR-ing closes_at >= now() with closes_at IS NULL cannot be served from an index, and on the plainest possible call it scanned the whole active pool and blew the 8s statement timeout — alternating between a hard 500 and a silent empty result. The split returns identical rows in identical order.
• Coordinates are ZIP centroids. Most sources publish a ZIP and nothing finer, so a lot's position is its town's position. distance_miles is town-level; the response says so, and it should keep saying so.
• Keyword search is full-text first, substring second. search_tsv (a weighted stored column, migration 092) stems and reaches the description; the trigram ILIKE pass only runs when full-text found nothing, because auction titles are full of partial model numbers a tsquery cannot match inside a word.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "us-auctions": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/us-auctions/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/us-auctions/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1481+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Us Auctions data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT