Building a regional farm equipment price index from 500 auction records

Aggregating scattered regional auction listings

Regional estate and farm auctions offer critical pricing signals for secondary machinery, tools, and antiques. However, tracking these listings at scale is difficult because inventory is distributed across thousands of independent auction houses across the US and Canada. Each local auctioneer posts their own catalogs, sets their own schedules, and assigns lot categories independently.

For developers building resale valuation models, regional market trackers, or inventory sourcing pipelines, gathering this data manually requires visiting hundreds of distinct site endpoints.

The HiBid Scraper provides a structured interface to extract live and timed auction listings from HiBid's aggregator platform. It interacts directly with HiBid's public search endpoints, returning normalized records without requiring login credentials or proxy configurations.

Targeting datasets with schema filters

Fetching an entire marketplace catalog isn't practical when analyzing specific item trends. HiBid's backend supports fine-grained parameters that allow you to isolate relevant lots before emitting data.

Selecting query parameters

Three core parameters in the input schema control geographic, category, and lifecycle scope:

1. category: HiBid uses fixed top-level numeric codes. For instance, "700008" isolates Construction & Farm listings, while "40089" maps to Antiques & Collectibles.
2. state: Restricts results to specific US states, territories, or Canadian provinces using standard two-letter postal codes (e.g., "TX", "AB").
3. status: Filters items by state or popularity. Using "CLOSING" retrieves lots ending soonest, while "OPEN" targets all active bidding windows.

You can also use zipCode and milesRadius to build geographic radius queries centered on local markets rather than entire states.

{
  "mode": "lots",
  "category": "700008",
  "state": "TX",
  "status": "OPEN",
  "sortOrder": "TIME_LEFT",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Running this input emits up to 100 open farm and construction equipment listings located in Texas, ordered by the time remaining on each lot.

Step-by-Step implementation guide

To set up an automated ingestion pipeline that collects lot pricing and seller metrics, follow these steps:

1. Select the run mode

Set the mode parameter based on the entity level you need. Supported modes are:

• lots: Search or browse individual items across auctions.
• auctions: Target overarching auction events and schedules.
• lotDetails: Fetch full metadata for specific lot IDs passed in lotIds.
• auctionDetails: Fetch deep event metadata for IDs passed in auctionIds.
• auctioneers: Discover auction house details via auctioneerName.

2. Configure geographic and keyword constraints

To build a focused equipment feed, specify keywords using searchText and filter by location. Combine zipCode (e.g., "90210") and milesRadius (e.g., 100) to bound geographic drift.

{
  "mode": "lots",
  "searchText": "John Deere",
  "zipCode": "60601",
  "milesRadius": 150,
  "shippingOfferedOnly": false,
  "maxItems": 250
}

3. Parse the output dataset

The run produces a normalized record array. Key price tracking fields returned for each lot record include:

{
  "lotId": "309402453",
  "title": "2018 Utility Tractor",
  "currentBid": 14500.00,
  "startingBid": 1000.00,
  "bidCount": 24,
  "status": "OPEN",
  "timeLeftSeconds": 3600,
  "auctioneerName": "Midwest Auction Service",
  "eventState": "IL",
  "sourceUrl": "https://hibid.com/lot/309402453/2018-utility-tractor",
  "recordType": "lot"
}

Unpopulated or optional metadata fields are omitted from the emitted output objects automatically.

Historical archive search limitations

A key constraint involves querying past auction data. HiBid maintains an archive containing over a million closed listings. While the Actor allows historical extraction by setting includeEnded: true alongside status: "CLOSED", running broad, unfiltered queries against this archive will fail.

If you attempt an unconstrained historical search without supplying a category, state, or searchText, HiBid's upstream database query frequently times out before returning records. To reliably extract historical pricing, always scope ended queries with at least one restrictive filter parameter. Furthermore, category classifications reflect choices made by the original third-party auctioneer during listing creation and are not independently verified by HiBid.

Operational costs and run pricing

Pricing for this Actor follows a pay-per-event model combined with standard platform usage billed separately at your plan's rates.

The fixed per-event charges are:

• Actor Start: $0.005 per GB of memory allocated to the run upon execution.
• Result Event: $0.005 per record delivered to the dataset.

For high-volume extraction, the result event price scales down across Apify user discount tiers:

• FREE: $0.005 per result
• BRONZE: $0.00433 per result
• SILVER: $0.00367 per result
• GOLD: $0.003 per result
• PLATINUM: $0.003 per result
• DIAMOND: $0.003 per result

For example, collecting a 500-item dataset on a standard Free tier account consumes $0.005 for the run start (assuming 1 GB memory allocation) plus $2.50 for the 500 result events ($0.005 × 500), alongside the run's underlying platform usage.

By structuring queries with specific category codes and geographic bounds, you can run scheduled batch jobs that capture price movements while minimizing unneeded event records.

---

HiBid Scraper is the Actor behind these examples. If a selector in your own version breaks, compare your output against the fields listed in its README first.

Prices quoted above are this Actor's published pay-per-event rates on the Apify Store, read from the Apify platform API on 2026-09-28. Check the Actor page for the current rates.