What is an estate sale? The sale of everything inside a household rather than the house itself, priced and run by a liquidator who takes a percentage of what the contents bring.
An estate sale is a sale of a household's contents: furniture, tools, appliances, art, china, linens, the contents of the garage and often a car. It is not a sale of the property. Most happen because somebody died and the house has to be emptied before it can be listed, and the rest happen because an owner moved into care, downsized, or split a household in a divorce. The sale runs inside the home over two or three days, priced room by room, open to the public, and by the end of it the house is meant to be empty enough to photograph.
A liquidation company almost always runs it, under a written contract, for a percentage of gross sales. The rate is commonly a third to a half and it slides with the size of the sale, sometimes with a setup fee or a minimum underneath it. What the fee buys is research and pricing, staging the rooms, photographing and advertising the sale, staffing the door and the checkout, collecting sales tax where the state charges it, and clearing out what did not sell. That last item is the one people skip in the contract and the one that decides who spends Monday hauling a treadmill. Disposal is normally handled as a buyout of the remainder at a discount, a donation with receipts, or a paid haul-away, and the contract says which.
It is not a garage sale and it is not a house sale. A garage sale is the owner pricing their own things in the driveway on a Saturday. An estate sale is a stranger pricing a whole household inside the home, with the specialist categories (antiques, coins, firearms, tools, instruments) researched rather than guessed at, which is most of what the commission is for. And the contents are personal property while the house is real property: the contents change hands for cash across a folding table, the house changes hands by a recorded deed months later. Order matters, because a listing agent wants the rooms cleared before photographs. Buyers find the sales on aggregator sites that list them by ZIP code with photographs and a start time, and the liquidator posts to those as part of the job.
A worked example
A three-bedroom home has to be emptied before it can be listed. The personal representative signs a liquidator at 40 percent of gross, with the rate stepping down above an agreed sales figure. The company spends 4 days sorting, researching and staging room by room, photographs about 300 lots for the aggregator sites, and runs the sale Friday to Sunday with numbered entry tickets and a staffed checkout. Everything left after 2 p.m. Sunday is half price. What still did not sell (2 sofas, a treadmill and 11 boxes of kitchenware) goes out Monday under the contract's buyout clause, and the house is broom clean for listing photographs on Tuesday. The contract decided who paid for that Monday, not the sale.
Questions people ask
How much does an estate sale company charge?
A percentage of gross sales, commonly between a third and a half, sliding with how much the household is expected to bring. Some add a setup fee or a minimum underneath the percentage, and clearing out whatever did not sell is usually priced separately, so the disposal clause is the one worth reading twice.
Is an estate sale the same as selling the house?
No. An estate sale sells the contents, which are personal property, over a weekend for cash. The house is real property and changes hands by a recorded deed, normally months later and through a separate listing. Emptying the house first is what makes the listing photographs possible.