GARAGE SALE ARTICLES

Yard Saling (having & visiting!)

by C. M Snyder

I am moving and had some furniture, appliance and assorted housewares to sell. A friend and I worked together to have a moderately succesful yard sale today, in the process I made a few observations of my own and learned a few lessons in retrospect.

We encountered some fierce negotiators in the process of selling my furniture. I had marked the prices very low because I wanted to sell them, only to have to negotiate the price much lower because I had only one offer and the person knew that I was in the position of "having" to sell. It may not be a bad idea to mark your items a bit higher than you'd like to sell them for in order to give yourself a little more room for comfortable negotiating.

We found the "best sellers" by far to be kitchenware such as dishes, glasses, utensils and more! Lower priced items (from a quarter to a dollar) tend to move much faster than more expensive items, regardless of the quality of your wares!

Having a yard sale obviously is done to get rid of things you don't need or need to sell in order to move etc. The idea is to make as much profit as possible which means if you want to get rid of what you are offering price it LOWER THAN LOW! By selling things you are not using for less, you will make more than you would if you tried to sell them for market value! It sounds backwards, but we found it to be very true!

I can not even tell you how brutal the negotiating skills we encountered were, but I can tell you how to profit from my experience!

Our customers clustered their purchases. They bundled like items together and offered half the price for the lot. We relented because the idea was to get rid of the things we didn't want to lug back into the house. A good example would be children's clothing priced at fifty cents a piece. Gather several items together and offer half to three quarters of the total price. You would be surprised at how often this works!

If something is in less than perfect condition, point out (nicely of course!) the flaws and make a fair offer.

It helps to know ahead of time whether the sale is a moving sale or a yard sale. A moving sale makes the seller more motivated to sell so that they don't have to move the items to their new home!

Christmas Tip

Set aside the Christmas Decorations you no longer use for your next yard sale! If you pack them up with the ones you currently use, you'll never remember to pull them out. Label the box or bag yard sale for easy future reference!