About Auction Trove
Auction Trove started as a free, nationwide directory of estate sales, moving sales, garage sales, and liquidation events. We were built by a small team of weekend treasure hunters and estate liquidators who were frustrated with how hard it had become to discover good local sales. We wanted a faster, simpler way to answer one question: what's happening this weekend, near me? (See below for why the directory itself is no longer part of the site.)
Update: Auction Trove no longer aggregates or republishes listings from any third-party site. We previously indexed thousands of sales by aggregating listings from a regional garage-sale directory; we removed that entire layer because the source's own Terms of Service prohibit this kind of aggregation and republication. See “Why we removed our listings directory” below.
What we believe
- Local sales build community. Every estate sale is a private home opening its doors to neighbors. We treat that with respect.
- Free for buyers, free for sellers. We believe weekend commerce should never be gated. Posting your sale on Auction Trove will always be free.
- Trust over hype. No fake countdown timers, no inflated review counts. Our seller badges and trust signals reflect verifiable reality.
Why we removed our listings directory
Auction Trove’s listings directory (individual sale pages plus state, city, category, and ZIP browse pages — 3,931 pages in total) republished listings aggregated from a third-party garage-sale directory, yardsalesearch.com, with a source disclosure on every page. On review, yardsalesearch.com’s own Terms of Service turned out to explicitly prohibit scraping, aggregation, and republication of its listings, with stated liquidated damages for continued use. Because the prohibition is a binding contract term and not something a robots.txt allow overrides, we removed the entire aggregated-listing layer rather than continue publishing it. We also want to correct the record: an earlier version of this page claimed we "never scrape sources that prohibit aggregation in robots.txt" — that framing was inaccurate, since yardsalesearch.com’s prohibition lives in its Terms of Service, not its robots.txt, and this page should not have implied that distinction made the aggregation permitted.
What remains on Auction Trove is the direct-submission channel described below (families and companies emailing us their own sale details) and the editorial guides in our navigation. We are not currently publishing a listings directory of any kind.
Editorial standards
Auction Trove's buyer's guide and sellers' guide are written by our small editorial team and reviewed quarterly. We include only practical advice, compiled from patterns we observed across the thousands of sales that were previously in our directory and from publicly available estate-sale resources. Where guidance varies by region — cash customs, opening hours, common pricing strategies — we say so explicitly. We don't pretend a single playbook works everywhere.
Get in touch
Questions, partnership inquiries, or press requests are all welcome. The fastest way to reach us is the contact page.