Getting Bargains at Estate Sales
14 September 2006SmartMoney has an article up on how to find good deals at estate sales - for the uninitiated, they differ from a garage sale because they’re usually liquidating all the stuff in the house, even though you often see people label a garage sale as an “estate sale.” The article has some good tips on how to compete with the professionals who frequent these things. The article gives a few good tips such as getting there early, when you can haggle and when you can’t, and how to deal with professionals who tend to manage estate sales.
It also points to a blog called Yard Sale Addict, which I recommend for anyone who’s interested - it’s a guy who goes out every weekend, taking pictures of the random stuff he runs across at various yard sales. He’s found some neat stuff in there, and it’s a good “time waster” blog that works like a sort of virtual yard sale - you can just browse through all kinds of weird things without spending your money on any of them.
One big hole in the article, though: it mentions that many estate sales are posted for a week or so before “online” with photographs of the items, but doesn’t mention how to find them. I looked around and found Estatesales.net, a directory of estate sales - but in a lot of big cities, it had nothing listed. After searching around some more, it looks to me like most of the sales are listed company by company with individual businesses that run estate sales in a particular area. So, for example, in L.A., you might go to this site that has some pictures up of the best items in upcoming sales. If you’re in Chicago, try this site. In Dallas, try this one. Generally, I got pretty good results by going into Google and typing something like: “estate sales” and Dallas. Just plug in your own city, and try to find the sites for companies that actually manage the estate sales. If nothing comes up, you can find out with a little more work by going to sales advertised in the classifieds in your area and asking the people running them if they’re a management company and if they have a website. If you’re serious about this, you’ll want to get onto their mailing lists if they’ve got one.
I also ran across this excellent article that gives you some more detailed tips on how to deal with the “early bird” phenomenon where professional dealers will get in as early as possible - leaving amateurs out in the dust. This one from someone on E-bay discusses how you can make money buying cheap paper stuff at estate sales.
I also found this series of articles by a guy who was involved in running a sale, and gives you the inside scoop on how they’re run: Part One and Part Two.
If you’re a complete beginner and want to make some money on the side, you might want to get the book How to Sell Collectables and Antiques on Ebay, which is the best-rated book on the subject I could find (although not great for people who have experience doing it already according to the reviews). You’ll also want a copy of Antique Trader, which is a price guide with about 18,000 different antiques listed.
And finally, if you’ve got a sense of humor about it, you can hop over to The Onion’s article: Estate Sale Proves Everything Man Worked For In Life Worth $5,235.78.
I get the feeling you’d have to be pretty dedicated to make any kind of living out of this - and you’d need to have a lot of knowledge about antiques and about the various random collectables that people have accumulated over the years. On the other hand, it’s something that you can do once a month as a hobby / side business without too much effort. And if you buy stuff you’d be willing to use yourself, then it’s not that big a deal if you end up not being able to sell it on E-bay, as long as you don’t go nuts about it.
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One Response to “Getting Bargains at Estate Sales”
October 5th, 2006 at 9:58 am
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