Every company that goes bankrupt files a petition with the federal court system. PACER publishes those filings publicly. They appear 2-3 weeks before anything reaches the liquidation auction platforms.
I found this while trying to automate something else. I was building a monitoring system for digital asset opportunities and noticed a timing gap I hadn't expected. The data was public. The awareness wasn't.
What Gets Left Behind
When a company winds down, the physical assets move fast. Desks and servers get auctioned within days. The digital stuff just sits there. Software licenses. Long-term SaaS contracts locked in at rates that no longer exist. Sometimes a company was paying £30k a year for something the vendor now charges £70k for, with three years left on the deal.
Nobody bids on these because they're invisible. You can't photograph a perpetual software license.
What Actually Transfers
Not everything survives the winding-up. Modern SaaS is entity-tied — Salesforce, HubSpot, most post-2018 platforms die with the company. What transfers cleanly: perpetual licenses issued before 2015, aged domains with SEO equity that exists independently of the corporate entity, and long-term contracts with an assignment clause.
The assignment clause is the key. It lets you inherit the pricing, not just the software. You're not buying a tool. You're buying the commercial rate at which the vendor agreed to sell it five years ago.
The Buyer Market Already Exists
If a manufacturing company ran SAP, other manufacturers need SAP. They know the software. They'd rather acquire a transferable license than negotiate from scratch with a vendor whose sales team hasn't met them. Your job is connecting supply that went invisible to buyers who are already looking.
I built a monitor: automated PACER scraping, scoring by transferability criteria, flagging to Discord before the auction sites pick up the filing. The gap is real.
The verification step is the friction that keeps the market thin. Confirming transferability requires reading the actual license agreements, which don't appear in the public filings. That's the research leg. Still running it.