Estate sale preview pics, tons of glass, tools and antiques, eye candy anyone?

[kali_is_my_copilot]

I hated being the bearer of lame news but yeah I went and it was a bust. Different company altogether than I thought, who I'm probably done bothering with (barring a really exceptional sale of course) as they have been bumping prices up until they were just completely unreasonable at last week's sale. I don't know Jack about glass but I know enough to know that double digits on every. single. piece. is probably not very realistic. It didn't help that we got there late because of my dentist appointment, by 9:30 the place was swarming with people, most of the good stuff you guys pointed out (clocks/phones/clacky keyboard/knives/cameras etc) was gone or picked over and what was left was way over priced (imo). We got some small hand tools and I picked a couple of nice deep cigar boxes off the dollar table. Oh well there's always better stuff to buy somewhere else! And I still really enjoyed seeing what everybody got interested in from the preview pics, definitely helped me look at things in a different way that I normally do.

 

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[dejapooh]

I tend to avoid Estate Sales as the prices tend to be VERY high with the Professional outfits. There is one local outfit that asks full new retail on EVERYTHING. They will negotiate down... A BIT... but not much. Occasionally, they will miss a piece or two in the commonly overlooked areas. They tend to overlook rare books (of normal size, if it is coffee table sized, it is $20 and up). They tend to overlook household items (I picked up a VERY rare set of Bang and Olufsun phones for $7.50 each... Going rate on Ebay is about $275 to $300 each). They do High end sales, and generally refuse low, but reasonable offers. Take real value, subtract ebay and paypal fees... The will refuse that every time. Generally no meat on the bones for me.

 

[kali_is_my_copilot]

We average 6-10 sales a week here, more in the spring/summer, and sheer volume plus a decent number of private sales and fledgling estate companies mean if you keep going you'll hit something good eventually. In the last year I haven't spent more than $60 at any one sale and I've had $400+ returns on at least two I can think of; my best was $27 in jewelry that we cleared over $700 on when all was said & done.

However. For every sale like that, I have to go to 10 or 20 sales that are over-priced or full of junk (or not nearly full enough of junk, take your pick). Usually I have to either drive out the day before to sign up or show up two hours early the day of (a couple of weeks ago I showed up at 7 for a sale that started at 9 and there were already FIFTY PEOPLE signed up, which is admittedly excessive even for a sale where they leave the signup sheet the day before). I can only think of one company that is both successful and turns up reliable scores and several of the local outfits are completely insufferable personally in addition to over-pricing & over-hyping. It's still mostly fun but not as consistently as it was before reselling became my "day job" :/

 

[diggummup]

Yeah, good estate sale companies are few and far between. There's only a couple, three left that I will go to around here, and they don't advertise on estatesales.net. The family run estate sales are getting pretty scarce lately as well, though one of the last ones I went to was actually family run. I still prefer estate sales to yard sales though. I hate having to drive to 20+ sales to find 1 or 2 items all the while looking through heaps and mounds of useless crap that makes you wonder to yourself, "Why are they even trying to sell this junk, I doubt Goodwill even wants it for free?"
I don't know, it's been a while since I hit a good run of yard sale finds lately. Most of my better finds have been limited to estate sales these last few months.