A farm dispersal is somebody’s whole working life going across the block in a day — a retirement, or a passing, and the kids standing at the back of the crowd. You catalog it fast, you run it rain or shine, and you settle it so clean nobody’s stomach turns six weeks later. That’s the sale Hammerwerks is built for.
A farm sale is a hundred lots of big iron and a shed full of shop miscellany, and you’ve got a few days and a forecast you don’t trust. This is the part Hammerwerks actually speeds up.
Send a scoped, no-login link and whoever’s walking the yard shoots lots straight into your workbench from their own phone — the grain truck, the gravity wagons, the shelf of hand tools. No seat to set up, no password to share, and you revoke it the moment the sale is catalogued. Out where the signal’s thin, photos hold on the phone and sync when the bars come back.
Type the VIN off the grain truck or the one-ton and the year, make, model, trim, engine, and any open NHTSA safety recall land before you write a word. For the iron with no VIN, punch the serial and model. The recall check runs against NHTSA and CPSC on the trucks and the shop goods, so you catch it before it’s on the block, not after.
From the photos, the AI drafts a title, description, category, condition, and a value range — each with a confidence score. A second AI checks it. Then you approve every lot. It saves the typing, not the deciding. On a JD 4020 or a common gooseneck there’s plenty to draft from; on the odd piece it’s never seen, it tells you it’s not sure instead of inventing a number.
A farm sale is a one-day crowd. Everybody drives out on Saturday, the ring moves, and by dark it’s over. Trouble is, the buyer who’d pay the most for the combine is three states away and can’t make the drive.
Run the whole sale off a laptop at the venue. Floor bids come in on paddle numbers, online bidders bid in real time against them, and fair warning and hammer are one click each. One ring, one record — no reconciling two systems at the end of a long day.
Big iron pulls buyers who won’t stand in your yard on a Saturday. Timed online lots, absentee and proxy bids with a max, and a soft close that extends when someone bids in the last seconds — so the serious money on the combine can’t get sniped, and doesn’t have to be there to win it.
Every neighbor, dealer, and out-of-state buyer who registers goes on your branded bidder site — your name on it, not ours — and onto a list you own and can export any time. On a marketplace, that list of buyers becomes their asset. Here it’s yours, sale after sale.
Big iron means big-ticket commission. Sell a combine for a hundred and eighty thousand and your cut is real money — and if the son calls six weeks later asking what you took, “trust me” isn’t an answer. This is where Hammerwerks earns its keep.
The family signs the consignment agreement electronically, you countersign. The signed document is fingerprinted and the whole signing is recorded, so you can prove later that nothing changed — right down to the commission. Settlement statements settle against that signed contract, so what you take is exactly what they agreed to. And when a neighbor throws a few implements on the sale, he gets his own rate and his own statement — his money stays straight from theirs.
Invoice the buyers and collect — card and online through Stripe, or cash, check, and wire recorded by hand. The big buyer on the combine sometimes wires over a week; Hammerwerks won’t let you pay out a lot before the money for it clears, so you’re never fronting the family’s check on an invoice that hasn’t landed. When the funds are in, pay the consignor by check or electronically and record it. Partial payments settle on what’s collected.
Every sale ties out — money in from buyers equals what you paid consignors, plus your commission and premium, plus tax, plus what’s still owed. See how much consignor money you’re holding at any moment, pull a sales-tax remittance report, export the whole ledger to a spreadsheet, and print a per-consignor 1099 worksheet when the year closes. The arithmetic that used to eat a Sunday night is just there.
Honestly, no — not the way HiBid or Proxibid can. They’ve got huge registered-bidder pools and we don’t. If raw reach is the whole game for you, they win it. What we do is the workflow around your sale: faster cataloging in the yard, hybrid live-and-online bidding, settlement that can’t drift, and a bidder list that stays yours instead of becoming theirs.
No. No commission on the hammer, ever, and no per-bidder fee — and on a farm sale that’s the whole point: sell a combine for a hundred and eighty thousand and a marketplace’s percentage is thousands of dollars, where ours is zero. You pay a flat monthly tier by how many lots you run — Solo $99 (200 lots), Growth $299 (1,000), Scale $799 (5,000), 50¢/lot above that — plus a one-time $499 setup that’s waived with a promo code. 30-day money-back, and you can export your data any time.
Yes. Set his commission rate on his own agreement and he gets his own settlement statement — his lots, his hammer prices, his net — separate from the estate’s. You can run one big family dispersal and a handful of add-on consignors through the same sale without their money ever touching.
Yes — you punch in the serial and model by hand. The VIN decoder is a shortcut for post-1981 titled vehicles like the trucks; everything else uses the standard lot editor with the fields that actually matter for that piece of iron. An Allis-Chalmers WD doesn’t need a drivetrain lookup.
The furniture and shop tools, yes — there are plenty of comparable sales to draw on. The coins, the jewelry, a signed painting over the mantel — no, and it won’t pretend to. AI can’t grade or authenticate that from a photo, and it won’t price a thin market with no comps. When it’s out of its depth it says so and hands you an opening-bid suggestion instead of a made-up number that’d burn your credibility.
Hammerwerks doesn’t process titles — that’s your state DMV/DOT flow. But the sale record carries the VIN, the buyer, and the hammer price cleanly, so the title hand-off is straightforward instead of a hunt through paper.
Configurable per auction. Farm equipment usually runs 5–10% where general estate sits around 15%. Read Buyer’s premium 101 for the working numbers.
30-day money-back. Cancel any time. Your bidders see your name and your brand, not ours — and the list of them stays yours.
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