About the data

New York City's Marshals and Sheriff auction cars seized for unpaid parking and camera tickets. Each sale is announced in a PDF on the Department of Finance's site, and the PDF disappears from the page once the sale is over. This site keeps every notice, past and upcoming, and makes the cars in them searchable.

What “lender listed” means

These sales transfer whatever the former owner owned. If the owner still owed money on a car loan, the lender's lien stays on the car after the sale, and the lender can repossess it from the buyer. Every notice prints the lienholder for each car, when one is on record. A car with a lender listed costs its winning bid plus whatever is still owed on the loan, and nobody can tell you that amount before you bid.

“No lender listed” means none was on record when the notice was printed. A lien filed later would not show, so it is a strong sign and not a guarantee. Confirm the title with the New York DMV before bidding.

Where each piece comes from

• Notices: the NYC Department of Finance, checked daily, and the Internet Archive for notices back to 2021. The original PDF of every notice is kept and linked from its auction page.
• Make, model, trim, engine and original base price: decoded from each VIN by NHTSA's vPIC service. NHTSA has a base price for only about one car in nine.
• Recalls: NHTSA's recall database, by model year. Use NHTSA's VIN lookup to see whether a specific car's recall was fixed.
• Photos: Wikimedia Commons, chosen by year, model and body style and credited on each car's page. They show a similar model, never the car itself.
• Lender names: cleaned from what each notice printed, so “CAPITAL;ONE;AUTO” and “Capital One Auto Finance” count as one lender. Names that might belong to a private person are shown as printed but not offered as a filter.

What the site does not know

What a car sold for, whether it sold at all, its condition, its mileage or its service history. None of that is published. A car listed in more than one notice usually did not sell the first time.

Independent and not affiliated with the City of New York. Sales are cash only, as is, with no keys or test drives. Information here may be wrong; the notice and the Marshal's or Sheriff's office are the authority.