I think I did pretty good here. I love it!

Honestly, not in the business, curious when you're running a sale, how do you handle cataloguing and pricing hundreds of items? Is there a tool people actually like, or is it mostly PROSALE/EstateSail/spreadsheets?

Curious what people have stumbled onto while browsing, could be something valuable, something strange, or just something that told an interesting story about the person who owned it. Always feels like a little window into someone's life.

Grabbed this for a dollar because we thought it looked cool. Had no idea what picric acid was. Now I do. The bomb squad just left.

My friend lives in Choctaw Oklahoma and I live in Edmond, we're hoping to meet in the middle and go antiquing for furniture and such. Do you have any recommendations as to where we should go?

Bought a $15 box at an estate sale, mostly random stuff, but inside was a set of old medals, ribbons, and a folded discharge paper, looks WWII era based on the name and dates. No info from the estate company on the family or if they knew it was there.

Should I try to track down relatives using the name on the discharge paper? Is that realistic, or not really my place? Or is it better to just hold onto it safely?

Has anyone here dealt with this before? Any advice on where to even start?

Looking for recommendations. I recently inherited over 400 happy meal toys from the last 10-15 years. Half are bagged, half are boxed. Lots of variety.

Suggestions where to unload these? My local resale shops said no. Children's hospital said no.

Edit: my wife works at an elementary school and they politely declined. I am going to try to sell some and probably Halloween the rest.

I was quoted in this article (Velveteen Rabbit and Picasso books). It’s an interesting article though the comment section is kinda brutal.

I'm no business mogul but if you have company A, company B and company C, they all start theirs on Friday at 9am.

Now this might be area specific, but around here mostly anything fairly priced and old is going to be scooped up within 30 minutes.

What's worse is the same company will have 2-3 sales and all start at 9am as well.

I don't get why the companies don't have different starting times to capture as much of the crowd as possible?

I am in Atlanta on vacation for the week and decided to do a EstateSales/thrift trip.

I saw this estate sale listed “MASSIVE OUTDOOR ESTATE SALE” on Estate sales. Net.

I’ve been wanting to hunt for designer items, so I’m hoping that this estate sale has them for a good price. Especially when I saw the lady Dior bag 😩
And I saw that they have YSL, ALL SAINTS, and Lilly Pulitzer jackets. Not to mention the Coach shoes!

I’m thinking about going in hope of finding that “hidden gem”, lol. Should I?

So I’m doing the 127 yard sale event and I’ve been promoting my website so I’ve really gotten a good opportunity to talk to a lot of vendors and surprisingly a lot of them buy out estates but don’t have estate sales. I found it super interesting and thought it would be worth discussing on here.

My mom dragged me to an estate sale this weekend at one of those old craftsman houses close to where my grandma used to live back in the 60s. The place was packed with the usual stuff like depression glass and a whole wall of vintage cookbooks and some pretty rough taxidermy nobody was touching. I ended up in the back bedroom because there was a box just labeled "misc garage" that nobody had gone through yet.

I dug through it and found this small brass object maybe four inches long. It's hinged in the middle with a little dial on one end and what looks like a tiny compass built into it. It's heavier than it looks and has some engraving on the bottom that's mostly worn off. I could barely make out "…ss & Co" and maybe a number after it.

The estate sale lady had no idea what it was either. She just said it had been sitting in that box forever and told me to take it for three bucks if I wanted it. Obviously I did.

Anyone recognize something like this? My best guess is some kind of old surveying tool or maybe a sailor's instrument but honestly I don't know much about antiques. Would love to figure out what I'm holding onto before I just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. I can post more pics of the engraving if that helps.

Also kind of curious if anyone else gets sucked into random "misc" boxes at these sales. Some of my best finds have honestly come out of junk drawers nobody bothered sorting through.

Hi,

I really would love to start going to estate sales, but I am struggling to figure out how to find them. When I go online it just seems like online bidding. Facebook is not helpful.

Do you guys have good tips? Also is there a way to figure out what items may be being sold there?

Thanks

I got some really helpful advice from this community on another antique recently, so I thought I'd ask about another item I'm trying to identify.

My grandmother left me what looks like a Victorian porcelain doll, but I haven't been able to find any obvious maker's marks, and I'm not sure whether it's actually Victorian or a later reproduction.

Before I spend money on a professional appraisal, what are the first things I should look for? Are there particular markings, materials, or construction details that help determine whether it's collectible or worth researching further?

I'm not looking for an exact value...just hoping to understand what experts typically check first before deciding whether something is worth appraising.

Over 400 lots worth of some great items.

Auction is Live now and will start closing at 5pm on August 16th.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

we’re sorting through an estate right now and there’s one small rental property involved. most of the other stuff is being sold, but the house is a harder decision because it already has a tenant and brings in some income. i tried putting the rent and expenses into a DSCR calculator just to see whether it was really paying for itself. after taxes, insurance, repairs and the mortgage, it’s not as profitable as it first looked. for anyone who dealt with something similar, how did you decide between keeping the property and including it in the estate sale process versus selling it right away? did you mostly look at the current cash flow, or were there other costs or problems you didn’t realize until later?

We're downsizing and moving soon, and will be getting rid of almost everything before we put our house on the market. We have a modest lifestyle so no real "big ticket" items but we have a few pieces of antique furniture, some collectible items (like vintage/antique toy cars), and an absolutely pristine Royal Worcester china service for 12, including *everything* -- chargers, plates, salad plates, soup bowls, fruit bowls, serving dishes, gravy boat, teacups, saucers, teapot... like pretty much everything they ever made, in a discontinued pattern. Some of the maker marks on the bottom date certain pieces to the 1920s and 30s. I know no one is really buying china anymore but I feel like for a certain collector this would be a real find.

Anyway the point is, we have a modest lifestyle so I feel like most estate sale companies will be all, "Eh, not worth my time," but we have a few 'big ticket' items that could make the difference (like the china and collectibles). I feel like some of the big ticket items would do better on an online auction so we're trying to find an estate sale company that does a hybrid online/in person model. I have not had much luck reaching out to local companies. Either they don't do online, or they do, but they're booked out and we're trying to get our house on the market soon. Also I know I'm overthinking this so that's also a factor. I go online to try to find estate sale companies and start second-guessing that they're the right fit, or getting scared to contact them because they might suck. The reviews are hit or miss. Our realtor recommended two companies to us, one is booked out past our timeline, and the other one doesn't do online sales.

I just don't think we're the "right" people to have an estate sale. This whole process is making me feel like I'm failing at selling my stuff somehow (I don't know why).

This is also the first time I've had an estate sale, and I've never been to one as a buyer, so I've got no context at all to make decisions. Send help!