The story below is a preview from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Buying or selling, profit margin or sentimental value, monetary flow or strictly aesthetics: They are all part of the estate sale game. And, no, yard sales don’t count.
Dan Smith
Carole Gibson: “We know what we don’t know.”
Don’t confuse a yard sale with an estate sale. They are as similar as grandpa’s fiddle and Nicola Benedetti’s Stradivarius. Plain vs. elegant. Good deal vs. rare find.
Sandy Murray, marketing director of Building Specialists, who haunts estate sales, says it thusly: “Ninety-five percent of estate sales have nothing of great value,” which basically makes them yard sales. The rest, one surmises, are worth your time and a good bit of your money.
Dan Smith
Sandy Murray
Josh Holcomb of RoanokeEstateSales.com puts a finer point on it: “For the past 10 years or so I’ve mainly gone to estate sales looking for collections and rare items with high value that I can re-sell for profit online.”
Patrick Patterson of Pollard Street Pawn and Gun in Vinton adds a bit of color: “… The best part of buying collections in estates [is] hearing the stories of the people who loved these items before and are trying to find new folks to love them equally (or more). If we make a few dollars in the process, all the better.”
Fincastle artist Ed Bordett has been “a habitual collector for quite a while, looking for early American objects made within our area. If you don’t go look, you’re not gonna find it. I try to look at photos [from the estate sales] to see if there’s a hint of the type of objects I might be looking for. You get to know people, so there is a social component to it. It’s like a treasure hunt. I have found great things.”
According to Nerdwallet.com, an estate sale is “a sale, liquidation or auction of someone’s personal property after the person dies or decides to downsize. The proceeds may cover debts, nursing home costs, burial fees or other expenses. If the owner has died, leftover proceeds or items may go to beneficiaries. People often put instructions in their wills about what to do with these leftover items and proceeds.” That’s pretty basic and doesn’t cover all the bases, especially if the base was slid into by Babe Ruth.
Sometimes these “leftover items” are a good bit more than that, and sometimes the person whose stuff is being sold doesn’t even know what she has … or had. And not a lot of dead people furnish estimated value. The professionals do that.
Dan Smith
Josh Holcomb: “I’ve mainly gone to estate sales looking for collections and rare items with high value.”
Say your grandpa has just died after a long illness and our poor, tired grandma has accepted the reality of a nursing home. She has 50 years’ worth of accumulated goods in a 2,500-square-foot house. You’re going to need help. An estate sale pro is a superhero in this instance, somebody like Suzanne Houck, who owns Houck Asset Verification in Roanoke.
She may even surprise herself, like she did that time she found that a 36-inch-by-24-inch mounted crossword puzzle was worth $52,000. She also knows that owners “can have unrealistic expectations.” Sentimental value, in short, has nothing to do with market value. She knows values and says that “if you do your own sale, it is likely to be more of a yard sale than an estate sale.”
Patrick Patterson
Just look at a well-organized estate sale. You walk into an organized home that looks lived-in. The good pieces are easy to find, and the price is readily available (and often negotiable). Old, by itself, doesn’t equal value, she says. “We do our due diligence,” says the Southeby’s graduate. “We have access to a wide group of appraisers” and often they come back with surprises, both positive and negative, always honest.
Lisa Miller, a realtor and estate sale pro, says, “I do it differently than most people here. We help seniors downsize. … We have a yard sale for what we don’t want.” And when the junk is gone, “clients tend to make more” on what’s left. That’s when the sale begins to stretch out, lasting for days, shining the light on valuables, allowing price reductions as the sale progresses—with a bargain basement final day.
“I want to take time and do it right. Do it fast and there is less profit.”
Want to learn more about all thing estate sales directly from the pros, including Carole Gibson, who has been running them for over two decades? Check out the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see it for free in our digital guide linked below!
The story above is a preview from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!