My friend recently found herself needing to sell a house full of stuff and asked for my thoughts about estate sales.
How to know what to do?
Your Options for Cleaning Out a Home
The first part of the investigation involved determining the options for cleaning out a home. When you do an online search for estate agents, your first hit is www.estatesales.net, which turns out to be a referral service to actual estate agents in your area. There is another website, www.estatesales.org, that also lists estate agents in your area. You can also try Yelp, but the bottom line is that there are only a few ways to get rid of a whole houseful of stuff. These are:
- Traditional garage sale – You advertise, organize, price, and sell all items.
- Estate sales where the agent brings in his/her own stuff and advertises the sale to their own mailing list.
After a two-day sale, remaining items can be sold on consignment in the subsequent weeks.
- Estate sales where the agent works with specialty sellers to liquidate the home.
These agents have contacts for items like guns, knives, furniture, coins, and other collectibles.
- An online auction is different. Items are cataloged and advertised online for a fixed period of time.
Online auctions are typically held with no minimum bids and everything will be sold, even if you only get a dollar.
All of the estate agents charge between 35 – 40% of the total. Most agents can donate and/or dispose of any items that are left after the sale, for a fee. Some will also take items on consignment
Deciding What to Do
After researching and talking to both local Estate agents and estate online auction companies, we decided that an estate sale onsite, followed by consigning any unsold items best suited to my friend’s needs. Fortunately, all of these companies come into the home, catalog and organize items, appraise them, and get everything ready for the estate sale. The estate agents set a date for the sale and send notices to their entire mailing list. The online auction houses catalog everything, advertise and then hold a two-week online auction. They also supervise the pickup of items so you don’t have to worry about people in your home.
One of the things she didn’t like about the online auction approach was that they didn’t set any minimums for individual items. In contrast, the estate agent would appraise everything first and would not sell valuable items too cheaply. The amount of work required to set up the sale is significant. Look through your own house, in each cabinet and closet and think about the amount of work required to sell everything. “Overwhelming” is the only word I can think of to describe the feeling I have each time I think about having to sell all of my things. To me, earning 65% of the profits seems like a reasonable value proposition.
I chose to help my friend because I figured I would need to do this same evaluation before I can get rid of all of the things in my house when the time comes.
How would you get rid of your stuff?
1 comment
When we sold my parents place in ‘Vegas, we tried 3 different estate sales people. None would take our business because the house still had a lot of junk (3 generations of accumulation of stuff that ranged from old birthday cards to antiques). They basically took one look and said call me back when you have it all cleaned out. However, at least in ‘Vegas, any oak furniture wasn’t sell-able. Apparently, that was popular in the ’80’s but nobody will buy it these days. In the end, we ended up hiring a local guy we met to help us separate trash from Goodwill items from possibly sell-able items. Then we held garage sales. If you have a parent’s home you need to clean out, buy a heavy duty shredder as you will find all sorts of documents with private info like social security numbers…and occasionally, cash that was hidden away for “safe keeping”.