Estate sale experience. Any suggestions?

Having an estate sale was a good solution for us after my dad’s death. The house sold quickly and had a fast closing date. My brother lives 6 hours away, and it was just my husband and me here to deal. Also adding time pressure was the fact that my husband had a work project coming up that was 16 hour days for weeks on end.

We found an estate guy who sold all contents and hauled the rest off. I believe he took 35% of the sales. Ask around, different companies will have different policies.

As long as nobody is under the impression the sale should actually do more than break even it can be a good option, I think it's much less work than trying to deal with it any other way.

We had one for my MIL. My BIL found a great lady and daughter team. She came in and arranged the whole thing. Took 30% of what was gotten. Cleaned out what was not sold. BIL paid extra to have her clean for the house sale. I would have given her 50%. The sons lived 7 hrs, 12 hrs and 15 hrs away. It was nice.

If you have no expectations of making a lot of money and you have no problem with letting everything go--yep, an estate sale is a good plan.

I think it's good plan. Make sure ALL the stuff family might want pulled out and actually moved off the premises before the sale. We lost a lot of stuff when we moved mom & dad. And the yard sale we staged? Garnered us less than $500 and this was 3000 sf home, packed to the gills with stuff. It just wasn't valuable stuff.

Hire a reputable estate sale company. They'll have people who know the realistic value of your mom's things and will price them accordingly. If they're really worth their salt, they'll have a hauler who can take out everything that doesn't sell.

We hired a woman who specialized in my parents' area. She brought in her people five days before the sale and they staged everything, priced it, and had everything ready to go, including garden and garage items. She also has an email list of 1,500 people, didn't dicker on pricing, and had the whole thing running like a top.

We ended up with 500 people going through the sale in one day and made $17,000 before her 32% commission (which was worth every penny). She also had a hauler come in who cleared out what didn't sell (a lot of it, sadly) for $1600.

Two days after that, the Realtor's contractors came in and started sprucing up the house. It sold about three days after it went on the market, and we walked away having made a tidy profit.

I have experience with estate sales and the companies that do them for people.

Three things to remember if you're going to use an estate sale business

1) Make sure you see a pricing inventory on every object and item being sold. Do not let them price anything that you don't approve of first.

2) Estate sale people have no respect for boundaries. Even if you mark things 'Not For Sale' they will sell them anyway. Anything you don't want sold get it out of the house.

3) Do not let the estate sale people talk you into not being at the house when the sale is going on. They always tell a people they can't be at the sale. That's BS. The estate sale people always tell a client this because they may have expensive and valuable items to be sold.
The estate sale people put valuable items aside for themselves and they are not put out for sale to the public. They super low-ball the price then tell the person who owned them that they were sold.
I remember the estate sale my friend had when her grandmother passed. This woman had beautiful and expensive antiques. Of course the estate sale company told my friend she couldn't be present. So I went and checked them out. Many of the items that were supposed to be for sale weren't. They found their way to the estate agent's car. The estate agent bought them for next to nothing. In fact, we saw her grandmother's dishes and her tea samovar that she brought from Russia, for sale at an antique market where he had a stall. He was charging a lot more than he paid for them.
Never trust estate sale people. You can handle your own estate sale without bringing in a company.

I did this years ago. My Mom lived in a senior living facility that started with independent living, and you could work your way "down" as needed. When she moved into the MC section the last weeks of her life on Hospice care she was down to the one room of last treasures. We called an Estate Sale place in their town to take care of the things in the apartment. My bro and I were there to gather our treasures, keepsakes, photo albums.

I will say this, after listening to Mom go on about "this is worth this and that is worth that" you do learn that in a place that is FULL of last estate sales, it is all worth much less than expected. There are no longer people who "collect". And everyone is looking for cheap towels. I would say that it was all handled and taken care of very well, but there was less profit for Mom certain SHE had hoped. ("Oh, that Lawyer's bookcase was worth MUCH more than THAT".)

I would make it as easy on yourself as you are able, I would have as few expectations as you are able, and then I would call around and speak directly to people, choosing the one who would handle it best for your circumstances. I sure wish you the best of luck.

I did 5 of them in the last 10 years, all family,

My brother helped me with2 of them. We had our own sale, one weekend. Whatever didn't go, we donated.

We don't price individual items we have tables of small stuff, $1.00, $2, 3 and so on.

The furniture we negotiated.

We raised $4,000 at one, around $2,000-$3,000 at others. Unless you have original art, expensive signed collectibles there isn't much of a proceed to be had, young people today do not want others "stuff". Old furniture goes for practically nothing. My mother had some very good furniture, well made and old, we practically had to beg the people to buy it.

We called a couple of estate sale brokers some wanted 30%, some wouldn't even consider taking this on as there was not one Van Gogh in the lot.

Good Luck!

Needing this information too! Reading with interest. :)

It is our thought that, in our case, it almost doesn’t matter what the sale brings in. We fully expect mom to exhaust her savings in a few years at her AL, and that she will have to spend down to a Medicaid bed. So any proceeds that come from the sale would just add a month or two to her self-pay. Very sobering to look at $15,000 as three months’s living expenses.

However—I also see this as about the only place someone could rescue some of mom’s savings from the Medicaid pot. Anything sold outside of a sale would not have to be a part of the estate. Unfortunately we don’t have any real valuables from mom, save a few hundred dollars’ worth—and those things will likely be kept as heirlooms anyway and given to grandchildren, mementoes of their grandparents (crystal candlesticks, for example, and not much of that kind of thing.) Also, for us, the “memory items” the kids want are simple, meaningful thigs, and not the expensive stuff. Like a cookie jar my mom had in her kitchen.

And like other posters have said, the things that we thought might have some value just don’t anymore. Young people aren’t into Queen Anne or antiques.

We are doing a sale, however it comes out, just to be DONE. We will keep a few things to hand down, and let the rest go to people who want it. The last years have been nothing but trauma, and I don’t see an end to that yet. We would like the house thing settled, so we can move on.

We just participated in the neighborhood garage sale. Lots of traffic. Didn't price anything. Just took what they offered. Most people paid more than I would have asked. Donated all the leftovers.

We all accumulate so much stuff over the years it is often overwhelming at the end of life or when preparing to downsize or move to a "senior-type" type facility (AL, NH, etc.)....There are various companies that actually specialize in this just for seniors. We found some good ones talking with top relators in our area, especially if the house too needs to be sold along with getting the contents out of the home. Top selling relators often have connections with reputable "downsizing" or "estate sale" companies they work with, check w/them.

Document everything, taking pictures, keep pricing lists, have the company take credit card, Venmo, PayPal, or other types of clear sales charges for any reporting that may be needed later (such as if the LO needs to spend down for Medicaid). Avoid cash transactions, and yes pay any taxes that may be required. Again for potential later Medicaid qualification which has a 5-year look back provision, not a good idea to try to "hide" assets from any sales.

Some things (figure this out first) may be moved to your LO's AL unit, but figure out what is allowed (rugs often are not, trip hazard) and what actually fits. Pick only a few loved items and if necessary, a small storage unit can be rented to store some things your LO cannot yet part with. The rest is sold or goes to charity.

Sadly, many items have little to no value. Most younger folks have no interest in things such as large china cabinets, nor the china or crystal in them. I checked out the value of my mother's beloved china on the "Replacement's website" https://www.replacements.com/sell-to-us and found out "it had $0 value" that No One wanted her pattern, so I took the 12-place place setting with all the service platters/bowels etc to charity. Same w/many of her figurines and endless collection of tchotchkes...It was just useless stuff.

Having gone through this exhausting experience of trying to eliminate a life of collected stuff, my husband and I are starting to cull and clean out as much as we can now so it is NOT left to our kids. In Sweden they call this "death cleaning." Sound morbid/terrible, but actually at some point we all need to stop accumulating stuff and get rid of it so it is not left to those that survive us. Here is an article on that topic. I am doing this in waves. It took 60+ years to accumulate all our stuff, so I cannot expect to get through it in just one year but that is often how much time loved ones have to clear/clean out an estate. We all need to think about this before it becomes a huge burden to those left behind. https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/what-swedish-death-cleaning-should-you-be-doing-it-ncna816511

I'm going through this right now with my MIL. She wanted to have an antiques appraiser come to the house to check out her antiques. Unfortunately, what she has saved for so many years is not at all valuable. I didn't want to tell her that her little cache of silver-plated, dented pitchers and chipped lampshades was essentially junk, so I told her I have an acquaintance who does antiques (I do), and I would ask him to appraise and sell them. Whether or not he agrees to sell them in his store, I'm going to just write her a check for a couple hundred bucks, because it's too hurtful for her to learn their actual value.

We auctioned my MIL's furniture and household items after she was placed in a Memory Care home. The joy of an auction is that everything is gone! There was little of value so this was a good option for us.

We hired a company to do my dads sale back in 2021. They were such a blessing. I had no idea how it all worked when we started the process. We had his 2 older cars to sell plus a lot of small stuff. I knew i did not want to take on the car sales myself. Dad had 2 sheds of rat infested stuff that had to be dealt with. They had to put on hazmat suits for that. They got top dollar for his cars and I couldn't believe what they got for some items. They ended up selling $14,000 worth of stuff. Their rate was minimum of $3000 or 50%, whichever was higher (maybe because of the rat stuff?) I was OK with that because of the car sales and I wasn't in it for the money anyway. They hauled the rest away, swept and vacuumed. Since then, my husband and I are avid estate sale goers and have gotten some very cool stuff the last couple years. Slowly replacing our own old furniture with new pieces we find. Having been through the process, when you go to a sale, you need to be respectful of the fact all of this stuff was someone's life. All their travel, hobbies, work life, child raising, etc. And we have found it interesting that much of what we see are the very same things we both grew up with.

When I cleaned out and sold my mother's home after 45 years of accumulating, I called an estate company to take a look. Immediately I was told that there was not enough value in her possessions to make it worth their while and I should just do an estate sale on my own.

I took that advice and ended up making about $500.00 after tons of work, cleaning, organizing, advertising and an entire day spent dealing with people who only wanted to nickel and dime everything.

About half of the stuff got sold and I donated what was left.

My advice is that if an estate company doesn't want to do a sale, then just donate. I'll never have another estate sale or garage sale. I'm done. I'd rather give it away.

Make things as easy as you can on yourself.
If having an estate sale is the easiest way to go that is what you should do. Does it really matter if the % that is charged is high. When the job is done it is done. And you do not have to deal with it yourself.
I have held a garage sale 2 times and that was more work than I imagined, after the first I said I would never do it again. (the second sale was not my stuff...a friend used my garage and driveway but it was still a pain to move stuff in and out and I lost my garage for a week or so)

When my mom passed away my dad asked us to start clearing out any rooms he did not use. The first thing I did was set up a hidden facebook page called Grandma’s Attic”. Next I uploaded a photos of all my moms figurines Wine glasses, crystal, silver and anything I thought had value. Wall hangings etc. My brothers wife prior to this had all ready taken what we wanted. I invited my sons & their wives along with my nieces and asked them to take a look and let me know what they wanted. If two liked the same item they could work it out among themselves. If they wanted something they posted in the comments. I gave them two weeks. I then boxed and labeled what they wanted. Next I removed them and their items from the site and added two girls from next door that had recently married and repeated the process. One had a curio cabinet and she took all of mom English figurines that were left.
After dad died we pretty much asked family what they wanted. My parents had high end furniture. Hardwood frames no plywood or board. Two sons took things like the hardwood Kitchen and dinning table each had 3-4 inserts to make larger. They also took the grandfather clock, Leather couch, End and coffee tables, and a few other pieces. My parents living room was only used for holidays. Then I asked a young couple we knew that bought the house up the street if they could use any of the other furniture and bedroom sets, lamps, wall hangs etc. they took a lot. Then my neighbors and newly married daughters and engaged son came and took most of the rest. Then a friend who's son’s house burned to the ground took everything else. Yes we could of sold everything but at this point I knew everyone that ended up with items and we had little to donate left. Then I paid someone to take the stuff left in an unfinished basement out. They swept up afterwards. I found the couples in their mid 20’s - 30’s loved the antiques & early American style even the wall paper in dads home, But the 40’s generation was only into modern. My sons and wife's 30-40’s loved the early American stuff. In the end everything was out in a week.
Do whats easiest for you.

I do not have an answer to the question, but rather a story.

I once told my mom about a work colleague whose mom was a hoarder. It got so bad that they had to reinforce support beams in her home because the second floor was beginning to sag. Luckily, my mom was never like this, and we both began to say, "No sagging second floor" when another useless item ended up in the trash. That attitude continued for years, including the remaining years of her life when I was her caregiver.

When mom died last year at age 93, I did not have to worry about cleaning out junk in the house or garage because we had pretty much got rid all the stuff that was not needed. I continue to live in the family home, and plan on adhering to the "No sagging second floor" motto moving forward. As the song from the Disney movie Jungle Book goes, "Just the bare necessities of life."

Had this experience with my deceased inlaws, as two of the 4 siblings (both brothers) were challenging my husband (the executor) about the worth of their "stuff". The estate attorney got involved with the brothers challenging the estate and cost them and the estate money. The executor did a round robin, so the 4 siblings could choose what they wanted of their parent's belongings. We then hired a professional seller at the request of the brothers, held a 3- day sale, and maybe netted $400 for their "stuff". They were packrats, garage sale goers and had 10 of everything they never used.
Morale of the story, while my mom's things are in storage, my sister and I will not do this while she is still alive. Pick what you want and donate the rest after they pass, unless they have it in writing that a certain item go to a certain person. Good luck!

Unless there are valuable antiques, art, jewelry or silverware, it’s probably not worth the time or effort for the money you will see.

My parents have lived in their home since 1962, they have accumulated an incredible amount of stuff, but nothing that their daughters or grandkids would want. When the time comes, we will be getting a dumpster.

I’ve devoted enough time to my parents’ issues these last four years, not about to spend more time to liquidate their belongings for a paltry amount of money. I’m annoyed actually that this too will be falling on my sisters and me.

Sounds like you have the pre-sale stuff done with the family taking what they want and likely figuring out what your mom will take to AL.

Yes, ideally, everyone would like to make as much money as possible with an estate sale but remain realistic. You are wanting to liquidate as efficiently and quickly as possible. That means that you will get less than market price for most items as it won't be sitting in a booth, store, or online until the person who comes along willing to pay the market price. Also remember "market price" at a garage sale or estate sale is a lot less for used items even if bought yesterday.

Any estate company needs to cover their labor, material, and truck costs and make a profit to remain in existence. If your mom has a lot of antiques, you might consult with companies that specialize in antiques. After you get a feel for the companies with the best reputation, ask for a consultation....should be free. If you have time, go to one of their sales to see how they set it up, get a sense for security, and the number of buyers. Make sure you ask questions to understand what options they provide and the fee structure...fixed percentage of sales and any add on services (hauling, packing if applicable for offsite sales).

There seems to be some mistrust of estate companies by posters. I have not had that experience.

Just finished emptying Mom’s house. Highly recommend an Estate Sale professional. Do your research online. Then interview a few companies and select the one that best suits your needs.

Don't make the mistake I made. I sold furniture/furnishings off piecemeal on NextDoor, FB Marketplace and other sites. By the time I tried to engage an Estate Sale firm, there wasn’t enough left to make it worth their while.

have family members take what they want—heirlooms, jewelry, photos, and then…bring in an estate company for the rest of it.

Good Luck.

If you are in a big enough city you can contact someone in estate sales they have the marketing strategies you may need if your parents have antiques. When I did my sisters, and parents yard sales were a waste of time even here in L.A. If you believe you have high end items call them and get an estimate if not just donate.

Please consider contacting an auction house and a consignment store.

I work for an Elder Law firm and we recommend Caring Transistions, they can handle the the sale, move and clean out and will deliver what is worth donating.

I just did one before selling my dad's home to pay for his nursing home care. It was a ton of work cleaning out a home of 45+years worth of stuff, my parents were borderline hoarders. I cleaned it out of all personal things (family photos, paperwork like personal bank statements, etc, sentimental items wanted to keep and any furniture and decor i planned to keep). Being an only child with only my husband and a couple friends to help on occasion, this took many months. Once I did all that I hired an estate sale company. Don't try to do it on your own, especially not living there. The estate sale company was fabulous, priced and staged everything, held the sale, cut me a check (they take a portion but we still netted about $8K, that of course went directlyto the SNF but I was pleased), and then found 2 different vendors who would come move out the remaining furniture and items that didn't sell, and offered me a lump sum payment for that. House sold after that quickly. It was an emotional and physically draining process but hiring that company was the best decision, they were so knowledgeable and also compassionate and caring about what I was going through. Ask around for estate sale company recommendations in your area and interview a few by phone. Good luck!

Interesting discussion. I'm following it. The Realtor we talked to recommended against an estate sale because she said, in her experience, the estate sale company won't touch it unless they, the company, can walk away with $5,000. I don't see that much stuff of value in my MIL's home. But I will look up more information. Good luck, Scblheron. I appreciate your raising this topic.

Hi, We went through this recently. After my dad passed a year ago it was difficult for mom to see anything taken from the house. As others mentioned, she felt that things were worth more than they are now and didn't understand why what she had in the house wouldn't fit in the bedroom she move to at family member's home. So many stressful days!

What we did...
1. Made inventory of items in the house, the current market value, whether family wanted it, or we were selling or donating. Dad's wish was everything that mom didnt want be divided equally so this approach helped.
2. Mom finally got to where she wanted things moved out. Lots of donating ...beware that there is a limit on what you can claim. Make sure you have documentation and photos for more vaulable items for tax records.
3. Looked into bringing in estate company. Finally got one to return call and take a look around house. Said we'd only break even so we kept working on it ourselves.
4. Lastly, a month before house was listed we moved mom, and had an estate sale. 3 hours on two Saturdays and made 600.

What did we learn...
It was important for us to move mom before having the sale, too hard see things go

Price to sell, no emotional attachment.. Check prices of items that sold on fb marketplace and ebay (not just those that havent sold)

Get ready for reality that all the things your generation valued, younger people dont care about. We couldnt even give away china to grandkids lol

Good luck!

Take photos. Go to Google Lens. It will pull up matching and similar items from the internet. Look for make marks, dates, etc. That may help distinguish your pieces. It's pretty simple to get info on what your items might be worth on the open market. The things my mom thought were valuable (That's an expensive dish. I got that at my wedding shower.) Really weren't super valuable. Occasionally you find a gem. I was amazed with a few nice Carnival glass pieces mom had that had never been displayed in the house and I never knew she had... and I love Carnival glass!