Estate sales can be pretty stressful. But, less so, if you know how to prepare for your estate sale. An estate sale will be more like a professional garage sale to liquidate the contents of your estate. Here is a quick guide for getting ready for one.
Consult With an Estate Liquidation Company
The first step you should take is to consult with an estate liquidation company. This will help you determine if an estate sale is truly the right thing for you to reach your goals. An estate sale isn’t perfect for everyone. The company can also handle a lot of the setup and clean up of the sale for you.
Organization and Removal
If you don’t choose to let an estate liquidation company handle the sale, you should start getting ready for the estate sale with organization and removal. Starting with organizing your items, group them together in ways that would make sense for someone coming to your sale. For example, place all the clothing items in the same area. Place all the kitchen items in the same area, and so on.
Then, once you’ve got all the items sorted, or as you’re sorting the items, remove anything you don’t want in the estate sale. It could be awkward to have someone come up and ask for the price of an item you don’t actually want to sell.
Pricing and Labeling
The next thing you need to do is to price and label your items. Determining the right price for everything in your estate can take a lot of research and work. If you price items higher than they are worth, they won’t sell. If you price items lower than they are worth, you won’t make as much money as you could have. To make things easier and save you time, an estate liquidator could appraise items for you, if you’ve decided to work with one.
Advertising
If you want your estate sale to be successful, it needs to be advertised properly. People can’t show up to your sale if they don’t know it’s happening. There are tons of ways you can advertise your sale. If working with an estate liquidation company, they will typically handle the advertising for you, so you don’t have to worry about that. But, if you decide you want to do the advertising yourself, you have lots of options.
Starting with online, there are many ways you can advertise over the internet. Social media is a huge way to advertise online, and pretty easy to do. There are tons of detailed guides online, explaining the best ways to advertise for Facebook or Instagram. Google ads are another route, but those can be pretty expensive. If online advertising isn’t for you, you can take out ads in your local newspaper, or place posters up in your area, so the people around you know your estate sale is coming up. Be sure to include the time, date, and location of your sale.
Afterwards
When the sale is over, people will come by to pick up the items they purchased. Then, with any of the leftover items, you’ll need to find a way to get rid of them, unless you plan on taking them with you. If you can’t take them with you, it’s common to donate the leftover items.
All Together
There is a lot to do to prepare for an estate sale. This was just a quick guide to get you started in the right direction. It is a big event that you can put together on your own, but if you want to make things easier, you can reach out to an estate liquidation company.