I am moving from NJ to VA, and the cost of a truck to move all my furniture is over $1000 when you include gas. That’s more than the furniture I would move is worth - a dining room table and 6 chairs, a microwave cart, a kitchen island and a TV stand/ storage unit. Actually, putting it all together, replacement cost would be about $1000.
When I moved from Rhode Island 3 years ago, I also went to Craigslist, but I only had a couple of items and managed to sell one. This is what happens when you put an ad on Craigslist.
You will very quickly get an email from several people sayiing they will take it and will send a cashier’s check for $50 more than you are asking to hold it.
You will get several emails from people asking if it is still available. You tell them that it is, and they never get back to you.
Someone makes an appoinment to come and pick up the item, and they never show up.
Someone makes an appoinment to come and pick up the item, and they do show up, but will only pay 1/3 of what you are asking.
They show up, and will pay full price, but, and this is a new one for me, to pick up a dining room table and 6 chairs, they bring what looks to be a Kia hatchback. It was a couple, and when they walked in, the wife was telling the husband to pick up one end and she would pick up the other. He asked me if I thought it would fit, and I walked over to the window and looked out and just had to laugh. The only way a dining room table was fitting in there was if you assembled it inside the car.
She said they would come back the next day with another vehicle, and I told her I would hold it, but I knew they would not come back. And of course, she didn’t have the decency to send me an email telling me that.
Ugh, sounds awful. Is there a NextDoor group for your area? Sometimes people are a little less scammy there. Make sure you have everything priced low enough to ensure someone will buy it. I’ve heard it said that getting 1/10 of what you paid is probably a reasonable expectation.
I was asking 1/3 of what I paid, some want to offer 1/3 of that. 1/10th, wow. So a dining rooom table and chairs that I paid $370 for goes for $37? Another reason not do to this again. I’ve thought about other alternatives, but at this point, not worth it.
I have found a charity organization that takes furniture. Hopefully they will take my couch, which I am not even going to bother to try and sell.
I did forget to include that in my calculation of replacement costs, add that and it is about $1500, and it would cost me $1200 to move it all. And I am not moving to a permanent location.
I own a house, live in the upstairs half, and rent out the downstairs. The last three tenants have all been good ones, people I knew personally.
Before that advertising the place was hard. Folks would call and schedule a time to view it, and two out of three would not show up, like the ones making appointments with the OP. Others seemed to never have heard of a security deposit, and one young woman was surprised when she had to pay rent up front. She expected to pay AFTER the month was up, and got snippy about it. Of course I didn’t rent to her, and she threatened to call some renter’s rights agency and report me for racial discrimination.
I used to own a house, and when I had hard times financially, had to rent a couple of rooms.
My advice to anyone who thinks it would be a good idea to make some extra money by renting a room, unless you are starving, don’t do it! All it takes is one jerk who doesn’t pay rent and you have to take him to court, and he lives rent free for 3 months. That almost happened to me, but I was finally able to reason with him and he moved out.
Yeah, when you think about what a piece of furniture should cost, you’re thinking of what it would cost at a store, with all their overhead. And stores don’t sell out all their inventory every day. Yard sales and craigslist sales have a much lower expectation of what something will go for in order to get the sale. And you’re trying to unload it. You don’t have the luxury a store does of holding onto it for weeks until someone is willing to pay the higher price.
I never allow emails from Craigslist. At least half will be scams. If someone really wants to buy what I have, they can fucking well pick up a phone and make an appointment. I’ve sold four cars with Craigslist without a hitch. The one time I had a weak moment and allowed emails for my Taylor guitar, I got hit with scammails right off the bat, ranging from “I’ll send you a check for $50 more so you’ll hold it for me”, to “I’m a doctor and too busy to come look at it, but if you drop it off at my office. . .” One of the guys who actually showed up to look at the instrument sat and stank up my living room playing the thing for 20 minutes, then tried to low-ball me. Fuck off.
I was asking a little more than what I now know is to be expected. But the price is on the post, and I not only include a pic of the item, but a link to the website where I bought it. They know what they are getting. And I understand negotiation, if you are a buyer you offer less than asking. For example I have the microwave cart, paid $125 unassembled and unstained. I was asking $50 initially, and would have come down. Got no response, lowered price to $25. Got an email today, $20 offer, I said I would take it.
Let’s see if she actually shows up on Tuesday with a vehicle large enought to hold it. Delete point 4 from my OP. If I could just count on people to come over when they say they will, no problem. Going back to the dining room table and chairs, I had to reschedule 3 times before they showed up. WIth a Kia
The only reason I am now going to bother with the $20 for the cart is because I have some other items that I am not even going to try and sell, I am offering them to her for free, just to get them out of here. I have a bad back, trying to minimize moving things to the trash as much as possible.
Many years ago I sold some stuff on Craigslist before moving cross-country. I had some of the experiences in the OP, but it wasn’t too bad.
I had no idea Craigslist was even still a thing until about a month ago.
A friend and I were planning a road trip to Bismarck, ND, one of the few places you could see pro baseball this year (the independent Northwoods League), and where there was hardly any COVID to speak of. I bought several days worth of baseball tickets, but the trip was cancelled at the last minute.
I decided to try to recoup at least some of the cost of the tickets. StubHub and the like were not an option because these games were not already in their database.
So I turned to Craigslist. I followed all their rules - one event per post, no sales over face value, only post in the correct geographic region - only to have my posts deleted time and time again.
There is actually a form one can fill out to inquire about deleted posts. To submit it I was required to create a message board profile, so I did. And after filling out the rather ridiculously extensive questionnaire, I clicked on submit, and saw the message, “Your profile is too new to post here. Please try again in 7 days.”
Well, since all of the tickets I wanted to sell were less than a week away, that did me no good. So in this case, Craigslist proved worse than useless, as I lost about two hours of my life futzing around with it and got nothing in return.
I’ve said this before and gotten some push back for it, but it’s always worked well for me. Granted, when I’ve sold things on CL, I’m not in a rush (for money or to be rid of what I’m selling). I usually make everything as clear as I can in the post. I post several pictures, a good description, my selling price and my ‘terms’ (ie must pick up or this is big, you’ll need a large vehicle or trailer or this is for all 25 units etc).
Like everyone else, I get a bazillion emails. Delete the scams, that’s a no brainer. With the rest, I usually just reply to the ones that seem reasonably close to what I’m looking for. If I posted something for $300 and they offer me $75, I’m not going to reply. If they really really super want it, but can’t pick it up for two weeks, I’m not going to reply. If they ask me to do something that I consider either unreasonable or that they could just as easily do on their own, I’m not going to reply.
Something to keep in mind. In general, what I’m selling isn’t anything out of the ordinary. If I put a 15 year old pick up truck or an 100gallon aquarium on CL, I’m not going to have a problem finding buyers. I don’t see any reason to even reply to someone offering me half the price or asking me to hold it for a week when I have 3 other potential buyers, one of whom says they can stop by in an hour with the money.
I’ve run into that problem as well. I don’t know what people don’t understand about ‘this item is several hundred pounds and I won’t be able to help you move it, please bring a friend’ or ‘this item is very large, you’ll need a truck’. But it’s very common.
Seems like Facebook Marketplace has replaced a lot of CL. And many areas now have FB groups for ‘XXX County online yard sale’. Though from what I’ve read, you get exactly the same problems on those platforms.
Am I the only one shocked by the $1k cost of moving the stuff? Obviously I haven’t looked into it, but I’d expect something more like $100 for a day of truck rental, $200 for the time of 2 guys to spend a day doing the job, $100 for gas. Have you got more than one quote?
I’ve bought and sold kayaks, pontoon boats, phones, a gas grill,etc, etc, on Craigslist and Facebook. My ads are always very specific and I just delete every email that strays from simple.
For most sales I offer to meet at a Sheetz gas station/convenience store (video surveillance) for safety. If the buyer shows but is a dollar short, I get back in my vehicle and drive away.
A few weeks ago I sold our old gas grill for $50. The guy showed up, his friend helped load the grill into their truck, and he left my cash under a rock in our driveway. Meanwhile, I stood distanced on our porch and answered a few questions. I had arranged the specifics of the transaction (Distanced exchange/heavy grill I wouldn’t help lift/exact change cash transaction) over email.
That last thing I sold on CL was a shit load of sheet pans (the big ones, like you’d see at a bakery). I had a few hundred of them. The going rate for these on CL was $5 each. I put them up for $3 each. Most people would send me an email, tell me they wanted 1 or 10 or 25 or whatever and show up later in the day with the (correct amount of) money. Naturally, I had a few the would offer me considerably less than $3.00. Mostly I just ignored them. One person said “Can I buy them for $2.00 if I take all of them?”. I agreed to that one and told him I’d have to see how many I had when I got back to work but there’s probably about 200 of them. He said “Oh, I thought there was just something like 20 of them?” and asked for a discount on 20 of them. What bugged me is that the picture I took showed well over a hundred, I don’t know why he thought there was only 20 of them.
In any case, one person wanted 50. We agreed to $150 and he was going to pick them up later. When he showed up, we loaded 50 of them into his car and then he said "I was hoping I could get these for $2 each. I nicely, but sternly said “They’re three dollars each, I can help you unload them if you want”, while glancing at his license plate because I assumed he was going to drive off. He paid the full amount, but that was a real asshole move.
The nice thing about this deal was that people realized how much cheaper they were so I sold all 200+ of them in about 48 hours and days later still had people emailing and calling me about them.