We had a death in the family recently. They lived alone and owned the usual household items plus a good amount of stuff that nobody in the family particularly wants (tools, collectibles, knicks and knacks). It seems an estate sale is on the horizon.
I know I could fire up the Google Machine, but I’d like some individual input. We would not do it ourselves, we would hire a company to run the sale. My questions all revolve around how the process works.
Does the company arrange the items? Price them? With or without our input?
How does the fee structure typically work? Percentage? Flat fee? I’m guessing flat fee plus percentage.
There are companies that specialize in that. They categorize everything, price it and sell it. Stuff that doesn’t sell gets donated to charity. You get a cut of the sales and the tax deduction for the charitable stuff.
I’ll be looking into this in a year or so. And will keep an eye on this thread.
My mom recently died. My Wife has been a real trooper bagging up clothes and such and just taking it to donate. I’m managing the estate itself. Death is… complicated. My wife and I make a good team. We collaborate on big decisions, but for the most part can just work independently.
Mom’s house is 100 miles away. I’ve set up a computer there, and upgraded the internet so I can work from there once in a while. I also set up a security system that I can monitor remotely.
Not everything can be donated, and I’ve given everything that family wants to them. The family is in pretty much the same boat as my Wife and I. We don’t need more stuff. We’ve been trying to get rid of stuff.
I worked a side hustle for an estate sale company for about 5 years. The most common method is to offer a set price for the entire estate. This includes the entire set up, sale and removal of all unsold merchandise. The amount offered will depend on a general value of the estate, generally 25 to 33%. Some people might think this is a small amount but a successful sale will sell about the 25 to 33% of the merchandise. On top of this there are a few other expenses that the family will have to pay for such as appraisals and security. The estate will also have an income tax liability too, the estate will receive a 1099. There are other items that may incur other charges such as the sale of motor vehicles and real estate. There are also items estate sale company won’t want to deal with such as large book collections and dead animals. Dead animals means things such as mounted or stuffed game. The only parts of these that might sell are antlers that can be repurposed.
This makes me feel better about donating a book case full of old favorites, dusty and unopened for years. But a dead animal zoo has no value? This would be news to a loved one who spent 100’s of 1000’s of dollars on African safaris and shipping his dead zoo collection back home. Cant walk in his house with out dead eyes following you everywhere.
When my parents moved to the retirement community, we hired a wife-and-husband company to conduct the estate sale. (This was after we kids had gone through everything and took what we wanted, which wasn’t much.) They arranged, displayed, and priced everything.
After the sale, whatever was left was removed. Some stuff was donated, and some was trashed. But it was gone.
As I recall, they took 35%, which, in my mind, was worth it.
I’m in the middle of an estate sale right now. This is for the leftovers after my first wife died and my new wife and I moved to a new place with all new furniture. We only kept one household worth of new wife + my housewares, so there’s one whole household of that to sell as well as a whole houseful of furniture.
Procedurally it went like this. After some googly research, I hired a sales company. They came in, inventoried everything, took pix of everything, priced everything, then ran an online auction for a couple weeks, 3 days of in-person sales at the condo, and now another week of online. What’s left after that will be hauled away. As of now the leftovers are about 20% of the original housewares and artwork and about 50% of the furniture.
At the end they present me with a report of what sold for what prices, and a check for my share of that. They keep the rest.
So stupid easy, but I probably won’t net much money. Certainly not even a dime on the dollar of what I paid for all that stuff over the decades, and probably closer to a nickel. But I didn’t have to do much any work to get rid of it. That is enormously valuable.
This is really interesting, but also makes sense. A hunting trophy is something that the original owner attached loads of meaning and memories to. That is all lost when the trophy is sold - it’s just a piece of some dead animal.
Exactly. Said another way, the market for such items must be tiny - a large percentage of the population find stuffed animals rather distasteful, and of those who don’t, they (I assume) are mostly interested in displaying creatures they have hunted themselves, not those killed by someone else.
Understood. I’m happy with my decision, other than wishing the process had been a bit quicker and that more of the bulkier furniture had sold. But aside from wishes, my realistic expectations are more than fulfilled.
I just wanted to make sure the OP got the point that while TV shows demonstrate various family detritus having enormous value, the truth is rather less inspiring. Perhaps paradoxically, mass-produced stuff bought for cheap when new probably retains a higher fraction of its value than expensive items or original art or …
It’ll be maybe next summer when I do this. Living 100 miles away, And sometimes staying overnight at the house to be sold complicates what I want to keep there.
I’ll want the computer there until the house is sold. I think. But when I turn it over to a relator I suppose I should just clear it all out.
I’ll keep a computer there and table for it to sit on. A chair for said computer and perhaps some lights. I have a blow up mattress that is very easy to take down.
My wife had an estate sale this summer after her mother passed away and her father moved to assisted living. Similar to above - the estate company did pretty much everything. All my wife had to do was indicate anything that wasn’t to be sold - they moved all that out of the open area. They did let the people who bought the house have a first look at everything - they bought some stuff, didn’t buy other stuff that they hoped wouldn’t get sold at the estate sale, since then they’d get it for free. Then they got mad that most of that stuff sold.
IIRC, they did 2 days at full price, then one more day at 50% off, then got rid of anything that didn’t sell. At the end the estate sale company gave her a full list of everything and how much it sold for. I believe my wife and her brother got 50% of the sale proceeds.
To be fair, unless you purchased things people actually collect, getting a dime on the dollar for stuff that you’ve had and used for decades is all you could expect even if you did all the legwork yourself.
IME people really overestimate the value of their “stuff.” We’ve told our kids that we’ve made lists of the relatively few things we own that should have any real value (basically some jewelry, specialized tools/books, and a couple of our instruments), so that, if they don’t want them, they at least place them out for consignment sale. In our early 60s, we’re pretty consciously “using up” what we have, and buying as little as possible.
Some friends recently downsized from a 6-bdrm house of decades, to a 2 berm unit in assisted living. I was impressed at how intimate they were at the costs various services charged just to haul stuff away. Sounds like you might break even on that front - using the profits from selling some of your stuff to pay to dispose of the rest.
'Zactly. When aged MIL died earlier this year we knew 99% of her possessions were trash. It was the last 1% that had any value, and even that wasn’t much.
I’m not surprised the same thing applies to my own stuff, despite it being not quite as far down the depreciation / obsolescence curve as her stuff.
I’m mostly sharing for the folks who haven’t already learned this through experience. If one doesn’t buy or sell anything used, one might go a lot of years under a misapprehension about this stuff.
My college biology class had several such specimens on display, from students and other staff who inherited them and didn’t want them. A museum might want more exotic specimens; doesn’t hurt to ask.
Estate sale companies come in and price and sell things, and take a cut of the proceeds, usually in the 25 to 35% range. Any more details will depend on the company.