Estate Sale Tips

A Sharp Looking Advertising Sign

You are lucky to find several REAL tag sales in a season. When you do find them, put some effort into shopping them and/or flipping used items. There is usually an excellent selection of vintage collectibles and sometimes antiques.If you are including one in your weekend garage sale route, allow yourself at least an hour to shop there, and be there BEFORE the sale starts. Be there and be ready to pick when the sale opens. Move quickly, and don’t be shy. Grab stuff, and run for the pay table!

Estate Sale Tips

These sales are often organized by professional sale services. When you go to one of these organized sales in your area, contact the organizer and give them your contact information. It is mutually beneficial for the organizer to contact you when she has large sales for you to visit (and pick!).

1. The tag sales that ARE professionally organized will not have many huge bargains. Be careful trying to pick these sites. Most of the prices on the high-end and collectible items will have been price-checked online.
2. You can get great deals, if a relative that did not live at the house organizes the site! Talk to the hosts. Offer condolences if appropriate. If the organizer did not live at the house, prices will often be great, and they will be eager to unload volume. Make these people offers on large lots of items. You are helping them out, too! You can get some GREAT deals, if you are willing to help them pack up and remove stuff after the sale. What else are they going to do with the junk?! Any offer will often be accepted.
3. When the sale starts, get to the good stuff first. Quickly! Stuff goes very fast at these sales. Stack your finds in a safe place. Most hosts will allow you to put your stuff behind the table or somewhere else safe for a while. If there isn’t anywhere to pile you stuff, get as much as you can, pay, put the stuff in your car, and come back for more!
4. Organize your own tag sale just like any other garage sale, except you may wish to hire a professional organizer if you have a large volume of goods to sell, or you are unfamiliar with the value of collectible items. You will want to advertise outside of your local area, as well. Customers will come from hundreds of miles to come to your locations, if you have enough good stuff to sell. Put specifics in your advertisements, and don’t be afraid to emphasize your good sale and make it look better than everybody else’s common garage sale or yard sale. If your sale is going to be the biggest sale of the summer in your area, tell people about it. Make them want to come!
5. Here is an excellent local and national estate sale locator!

The Garage Sale Academy showcases three books which feature summaries of the content of this website:

• Almost Free Money discusses flipping garage sale, yard sale, thrift store, and flea market finds.  You also learn how to locate and sell free materials that you can find while garage sale shopping, or even just recreating outside. Imagine that!  Sounds fun, right?

There is a ton of original content (not obtained from other books or websites) related to finding and selling high-profit scrap metal, finding precious metals like gold and silver for free, and selling vintage electronics and their components on eBay.

• Fast Cash: Flipping Used Items teaches readers a fun and profitable system for locating used items for cheap and selling them online for excellent profit.

• Garage Sale Superstar features tons of tips for increasing your profits when you hold your own garage sale, yard sale, rummage sale, estate sale, or tag sale.

The information in this book is 100% original.  As veterans of shopping at approximately 2,000 garage sales over the last twelve years, we can authoritatively tell you what works and what does not when it comes to pricing garage sale items, advertising sales, making signs and stickers, and making the highest possible profits at your sale!