Estate Sales with Mike

Michelle (00:30)

Welcome to Decluttering 55 Plus with Michelle Passoff. I’m Michelle Passoff. This is the place to come for news you can use to get things done in life without anything in the way of the road ahead. Not only do we cover conventional clutter, like papers, clothes, and other stuff, we talk about whatever is confronting or confounding in your future. We aim to take these things out from under the carpet and put them into the light of day, learn new things, and be inspired to get things done.

and will open space to ignite dreams you’ve never even imagined before. We hope something we say here today supports you to invigorate your life and create a legacy, not a mess. Yard sales have long been a feature of American life. They started in the late 1800s when folks at shipyards would sell unclaimed cargo. In the 50s and 60s, yard sales grew to be family and neighborhood events.

As consumerism flourished and homes were built with garages in front of the house instead of the rear, garage sales flourished. Some have even taken the garage sale to the extreme. There is an event called the 127 yard sale that takes place in August each year. It extends through six states and goes 690 miles long. Rumor has it that each year,

There’s a long scenic garage sale that stretches 150 miles in Florida. There’s even a national garage sale day. Whatever you want to call them, yard sales, tag sales, or garage sales, they’re a great way to do some spring cleaning, make a few dollars, and prepare for the next move. So let’s talk about yard sales today with Mike Judkins because they’re a great decluttering opportunity.

Mike is the owner, founder and CEO of Treasure Listing, a site which links to an array of garage sale sites where you can list a sale when you want to sell stuff. And if you’re moving and need to buy, you can go there too to plan your shopping route. Welcome Mike. So Mike, tell us how popular are estate sales?

Mike (02:48)

Well, estate sales and yard sales are both extremely popular in the U.S. On any given in any given month, I should say on our network of websites alone, we have over 50,000 yard sales posted.

Michelle (03:08)

50,000!

Mike (03:09)

Yes, we’ve seen that many. It is a seasonal thing. And that’s only a, I’m going to say a fraction of what sales are going on because not everybody does advertise on our website. so I would make a conservative guess that there’s at least half a million of these events going on across the US every weekend. Yeah.

Michelle (03:38)

People have a lot of stuff. It’s really a great way to schmooze with your neighbors too, no?

Mike (03:40)

Exactly.

It’s definitely a great way to schmooze with your neighbors as well as meet people in your community. It’s a great ⁓ socializing opportunity if you’re into that.

Michelle (03:57)

And I’ve learned a lot that people as they are over 55 and aging, that’s actually a very important component is to get out there and connect with your neighbors and your friends and your family. So why not do a yard sale and earn money and get stuff out of your house at the same time? can combine the efforts. But what’s the difference between a yard sale and an estate sale?

Mike (04:24)

Yeah. So ⁓ basically an estate sale is like a, you could think of as a ⁓ massive yard sale where everything, almost everything in the home would be for sale. And estate sale also will typically take place inside the home. So ⁓ you’ll also hire typically a professional ⁓ estate liquidator or a state sale company to go through your items and research price and

inventory and then stage all those items to look at, you know, tracked away versus a yard sale is typically conducted by, you know, yourself or the owner of the items. And it’s typically just a small fraction of what is, you know, in the home. It’s just kind of, you know, you’re clearing out the extra stuff you’re not using anymore. And you’re placing it typically outside the home in the driveway or, you know, ⁓

in your front yard. ⁓ And ⁓ it’s typically yes, done kind of ⁓ DIY versus actually hiring a professional as it would be in an estate sale.

Michelle (05:35)

I see. And somebody who’s doing a yard sale may not be moving out of the house completely. So it’s a good way to even clean up if you’re aging in place. Is that right?

Mike (05:48)

Yeah, that’s correct. ⁓ Typically it’s kind of just a way to prune your extra items. Exactly. Prune. it’s, know, otherwise if you are not doing this, you know, as we know, ⁓ things can pile up and just get to an unmanageable state.

Michelle (06:11)

When you what, what steps do you need to prepare? Do you have to take weeks or months or how long does it take to prepare a yard sale? Would you say.

Mike (06:21)

You know, if you’re doing it with, ⁓ I would say a week would be a good amount of time to start preparing. But honestly, a lot of these are last minute events where the person actually just kind of decides to do it, you know, the night before and just takes the stuff out to the yard and just, they don’t bother to really research or price much. But if I think you’re,

you’re you want to do a good job and you want to be organized about it and you want to kind of ⁓ know what things are are valued at. You’ll start that process about a week in advance and you also want to just kind of get everything together. For example, if you’re selling electronic items, you want to make sure there’s fresh batteries in it or you’ve got the cord to it because ⁓

people are gonna wanna see, does it actually work? ⁓ So you do wanna have that, you wanna give yourself that time to make sure that you’ve got all the parts to the things you’re selling, that everything’s in working order. And maybe if it’s not, you know you need to adjust the price. Cause there are people that will buy things that don’t entirely work and they’ll fix it, but it’s not gonna be the same price as if it were.

if it was working. I would say like a week is a good timeframe to start planning.

Michelle (07:50)

Yeah, I would guess you want to be able to have the time to go through your house and make sure everything that you could sell you are selling so you don’t have to do too many sales.

Mike (08:00)

Yes, exactly. That’s another good

Michelle (08:02)

But if you’re, also if you don’t plan enough in advance, you’re not going to know to go on treasure listings and list your sale and market it and get out the road signs. Cause you want the most amount of people to come to your sale. How else can you ⁓ promote a sale or tell us more about how you do it on treasure listings? Cause treasure listings has many garage sale sites on there. Don’t they?

Mike (08:27)

Yes, we’re a network of ⁓ several websites. ⁓ When you advertise on one of our sites, it automatically goes to every single site in the network. So that way it maximizes your exposure. ⁓ And people that are searching for yard sales or garage sales, say on Google, they’re going to see all of those websites on the front page and they’ll end up on one of them or they’ll get

an email alert that they’ve signed up for that shows the sales in their area. ⁓ so it’s definitely a great way to advertise in the digital age when everybody’s got smartphones. do have an app ⁓ called Garage Sales by Map that’s available ⁓ for your phone.

Michelle (09:18)

That’s garage sales by Mac, like A C. ⁓ Garage sales by map. Yes. Okay. So get that app and then you’ll know where the garage sales are.

Mike (09:21)

⁓ by map.

Exactly. Yeah. And you can plan your route and ⁓ it just makes it ⁓ very easy.

Michelle (09:41)

How do you get yourself listed on there?

Mike (09:44)

So you can actually go to a website called postmygaragesale.com. And ⁓ that website is kind of our central hub to post, advertise, and manage your yard sale ⁓ listings. ⁓ You can also go to any number of the websites that are listed on treasurelistings.com and ⁓ add a sale directly to those websites. And it’s automatically gonna go to

⁓ again all those sites and so

Michelle (10:15)

All you have to list is on one and boom, you’re on all of them. That’s convenient.

Mike (10:22)

Yeah, it is a pretty simple process. You just sign up for a quick account and give your sale a title and describe the type of items in it. You can post photos ⁓ and provide all the details like the dates, times, and of course the address and all that.

Michelle (10:34)

Can he post pictures?

Well, that’s a real convenience. like to, encourage people to cross market. Also go ahead and put out those signs. long as you’re going to spend the time and effort to conduct a yard sale, why not draw as many people to it? You can, you can track, could check with, ⁓ commu what about community yard sales? Is that something that you’re listing on treasure treasure list?

Mike (11:11)

Yes. Yes. In fact, we actually have a dedicated neighborhood garage sale tool that you can, ⁓ we actually provide this to homeowner associations, but you can actually organize your own community sale. So your community gets a dedicated page on our website and it shows all those sales within that community yard sale. ⁓

It enables the community to send a special link ⁓ out to that community that allows people to advertise their sale under that ⁓ particular event. that way you get a lot of ⁓ attention because it’s kind of grouped together and the buyers love it when they can hit a lot of yard sales close by in quick succession because it’s ⁓

there’s just more selection opportunity for them to browse. ⁓

Michelle (12:11)

One of the advantages of a community yard sale is that at least in my community what they do is they arrange with ⁓ charity to be available to have ⁓ to go around and pick up the remaining items not sold so that you can have the convenience of getting that off your hands by the end of the sale.

Mike (12:35)

Yeah, that’s a very nice ⁓ benefit, I think. you always want to just kind of, if anything’s left over that you’re not using that wasn’t sold, yeah, just donate that.

Michelle (12:48)

Donate

it. Yeah. You don’t have to bring it back into the house for another day. You can be done with it. So how did you ever get into yard sales? That’s not everybody’s big business.

Mike (13:01)

Yeah, you know, when I was in my twenties, one of my friends came over for dinner and I was, you know, I’d known him since grade school and I was just kind of asking him what he was doing. And he told me that he was buying things at yard sales and estate sales. And then he would turn around and sell those on eBay for, you know, a huge markup.

And I just found that kind of fascinating. you know, I just, ⁓ decided to, just try to see if I could do that. And I just found it so interesting and fun to go around to these yard sales because it was just, you didn’t know what you were going to, it was kind like a treasure hunt. ⁓ it’s, you know, it’s just, you see interesting that you don’t even, you know, sometimes buy these things. It’s almost like, it’s like a, like a museum experience almost in.

in some of these. you’re just like, wow, that’s interesting. Like, I don’t want to buy that, but that’s interesting. And, yeah, exactly. And, I started becoming more more interested in them. ⁓ and so, yeah, it’s basically my friend turned me on and, and I was just, I’d never looked.

Michelle (14:03)

culture exhibit

Whoever knew that fateful day would change your life. So I like to do something I call yard sale tourism. went out to Los Angeles one week and we had nothing to do one Saturday afternoon. we said, Hey, let’s go to treasurelistings.com, see what yard sales are in the neighborhood. And we got to go to places, you know, more local than the main streets to see what was going on.

We even picked up a few things that we had to ship back, okay, you know, that’s the danger of going to yard sales is you add clutter, but if you select judiciously, then ⁓ you can really find some good things. So if you’re moving, you may think about going to yard sales to pick up things for your new digs. So it’s even good for that.

Mike (15:05)

Very true, yes.

Michelle (15:07)

So, ⁓ Treasure Listings, that’s the place to go if you want to find or list your yard sale. It’s treasurelistings.com. Mike, is that the right address?

Mike (15:19)

Yeah, that’s going to show you all of the websites in the network. ⁓ If you just want to ⁓ advertise, would suggest going to postmygaragesale.com. ⁓ And from there, you can ⁓ do an ad. It’s free. We do offer ⁓ some upgrades that you can purchase for additional visibility, but the basic listing is completely free.

Michelle (15:45)

Wonderful. is ⁓ a word I love to hear. Well, that’s all we have time for today. So I want to thank you, Mr. Mike Jenkins for dropping in. So those of us who can stand to let go of some of our stuff can consider how much fun and freeing hosting our own garage sale or yard sale might be. It’s never bad to make a few bucks or take the funds and contribute to a worthy cause in your neighborhood. Don’t forget to go to our website, www.dk.gov.au.

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