It is a sale of the contents of a household rather than of the house itself, the furniture, tools, china, art, linens and everything in the drawers, usually staged inside the home over two or three days and run by a company that prices the goods, works the doors and takes a percentage of the take.
The name misleads people twice. An estate sale does not sell real estate, and it does not require anybody to have died. It is the liquidation of a household's possessions, and it happens after a death, before a move into assisted living, in a divorce, or when a family is downsizing out of a house they filled over forty years.
What is actually being sold
Everything. That is the difference from a garage sale, where a family sells a selection of things they no longer want. An estate sale empties a house: the furniture in every room, the kitchen down to the mixing bowls, the tools and the ladder in the garage, the linens, the books, the art on the walls, the lawnmower, the shed, sometimes the car.
The house is open and the buyers walk through it, which is why the sale is held on site. A company will normally stage the contents room by room, price them with tags or a numbering system, restrict how many people are inside at a time, and staff the checkout and the doors.
Who runs one
Two options, and the choice is mostly about how much there is and how much time the family has.
An estate sale company handles it for a percentage of the gross, commonly around a third and negotiable with the size and quality of the contents, sometimes with a set-up fee or a minimum. What that buys is the part families underestimate: knowing what the contents are worth, which is the difference between a table sold for what a table costs and a table sold for what that maker's table costs. They also bring the staff, the tables, the signage, the advertising and a mailing list of regular buyers, and many will handle the clean-out afterwards.
Running it yourself saves the commission and costs a great deal of time, and the risk is the pricing. Under-price and the good pieces are gone in the first hour to dealers who knew exactly what they were. Over-price and nothing sells and you still have a full house at the end of Sunday.
How the days work
The standard shape is a weekend, and the pricing changes as it goes.
- Set-up, usually a week or so, while the company sorts, researches and prices the contents, and the family removes anything they are keeping.
- Day one, full price. Dealers and serious collectors come first, often queuing before the doors open, and the best pieces leave in the first hours.
- Day two, a general discount off the tags, commonly a quarter or a half.
- Day three, deeper discounts and negotiation on almost anything, with the goal of emptying the house.
- The remainder, which is donated, taken by a buy-out dealer for a lump sum, or hauled away. Getting this agreed in the contract matters, because a house that still has to be emptied is not ready to photograph.
Where the money goes
If the owner has died and the estate is in probate, the contents are estate assets. The proceeds belong to the estate, not to whichever relative organised the sale, and they go into the estate account to be used in the statutory order: the costs of administration first, then the creditors, then the heirs. A personal representative should keep the company's settlement statement and the itemised sales report, because heirs ask what the contents brought and an accounting is part of the job.
Where nobody has died, the proceeds simply belong to the owner. Either way, the family should take what they want before the tagging starts, in writing, with the list circulated to everyone. Items removed after they have been priced are the single most reliable source of arguments in this whole process.
How it differs from selling the house, and how buyers find one
The estate sale and the sale of the property are separate transactions with separate professionals, and they run in sequence: contents out, then clean and repair, then photographs, then list. A house full of belongings cannot be marketed, and scheduling the estate sale is normally the first item on a personal representative's list once the authority is in place.
Buyers find estate sales through dedicated listing sites that index sales by date and area with photographs of the contents, through the companies' own mailing lists, and through the signs that go up on the corner that morning. Kouzr does not list estate sales; what we hold is the property record and the sold prices, which is the other half of the same house.
Questions people ask
How is an estate sale different from a garage sale?
Scale, location and pricing. A garage sale is a selection of unwanted items in a driveway, priced to move. An estate sale liquidates an entire household from inside the house, is usually run by a professional who researches what the pieces are worth, and draws dealers and collectors rather than neighbours.
Do you need a company to run an estate sale?
No, a family can run one, and it makes sense where the contents are ordinary and somebody has the time. A company earns its percentage when the house holds things whose value is not obvious, since misidentifying a piece costs more than the commission would have.
What happens to whatever does not sell?
It is donated to a charity that will collect, sold in bulk to a buy-out dealer for a single price, or hauled to the dump, and the contract should say which and who pays for it. Leaving the decision to the last afternoon is how a house stays full for another month.