Estate Sales in a Hoarded Home: What to Expect

First, a word about the person who lived there

A hoarded house is a hard thing to walk into, and the hardest part is often not the smell or the scale but what it seems to say about someone you loved. Families arrive at these houses feeling shame, anger and guilt in roughly equal parts, and it helps to know two things before you start.

The first is that hoarding is a recognized condition, not laziness or a failure of character. It tends to deepen with age, isolation and loss, and it is common enough that every established estate sale company has seen it many times and has a way of working with it. The person who lived in this house was, in many cases, someone who could not throw anything away because every object carried a possibility: it might be useful, it might be worth something, it might be needed by somebody. That is a kind of care that went wrong. It is not a verdict on them or on you.

The second is that the house is not the person. What you are about to clear is the condition's work, and it is possible to be gentle about the person while being entirely practical about the piles. The guide to grief and clearing a parent's home is worth reading before the first sorting day, because a hoarded house compresses everything it describes into a smaller space and a longer job.

Will an estate sale company take a hoarded house?

Some will, and some will not, and the difference is usually whether the company has a sorting crew and the patience for a job that takes weeks rather than days. A conventional estate sale is a few days of staging in a house that is already broadly sorted. A hoarded house is a sorting job first and a sale second, and the sorting is most of the labor.

What a company is weighing when it looks at the house:

• The kind of hoard. A house full of purchases, collections, papers and furniture is a sale with a long set-up. A house full of garbage, rotting food and animal waste is a hazardous clean-out first, and many companies will not touch it until a specialist cleaning crew has been through.
• Whether there is likely to be enough of value to pay for the sorting. This is the company's version of the minimum every sale has, and it is why honesty in the first call matters. A company that discovers the true state of the house at the walk-through, having been told it was “a bit cluttered,” will often decline on the spot.
• Access and safety. Can the crew get in and move through the rooms? Are there paths? Is the floor sound? Is the power on?
• The timeline. A hoarded house is not a three-week job. A company with sales booked every weekend may not be able to give it the month it needs.

Tell the company what it is in the first message, with photographs. “My mother's house; she had a hoarding problem; the rooms are full to about waist height; there are paths; no animals; here are six photos.” That sentence saves everyone a wasted visit and brings you the companies that do this work. If several decline, the guide to why estate sale companies turn down jobs explains what each reason means and what to try next; often it is a clean-out company for the first pass and a sale company for the second.

How companies approach a hoarded house

The companies that take these jobs work in layers, and the method is worth knowing whether you hire one or do the first pass yourselves.

1. Paths and safety first. Before anything is sorted, the crew opens a route through every room to the windows and the exits, checks the floors, gets the power and water working or confirms they are off, and deals with anything hazardous. Nothing is sold yet.
2. The papers are pulled. Every envelope, box of documents, purse, coat pocket and drawer is checked for the things that matter: the will, deeds, titles, financial statements, cash, jewelry, medication and photographs. In a hoarded house these are everywhere, mixed in with the junk mail, and the crew is trained to look. See the section below on the paperwork.
3. Sort into four piles, room by room: sell, keep for the family, donate, and dispose. The sell pile is smaller than the family hopes and larger than they fear.
4. The dispose pile leaves early, by dumpster, so the crew can see what it is working with. This is where the cost shows up; see the next section.
5. Then the sale is staged from what remains, exactly as a normal sale is, though often with a smaller crowd allowed in and a longer run.
6. Then the clean-out of what does not sell, and often a cleaning crew after that.

The whole process commonly runs to a month or two, sometimes longer, and a company that quotes a fortnight for a full house has not understood it. Ask at the walk-through how the company will sequence the work and what it will do with the papers, and read the guide to what to expect at a walk-through so you can tell a considered answer from a hopeful one.

What it costs

A hoarded house costs more to sell than an ordinary house, and the cost arrives in several forms. None of them is improper if it is in the contract before you sign, and all of them should be:

• A higher commission, or a sorting fee alongside the usual commission. Commission on an ordinary sale is commonly somewhere between roughly a third and a half of gross sales, varying by region and by estate; for a hoarded house, expect a quote toward the higher end, or a separate set-up charge, because the labor is several times what a normal sale takes.
• Sorting or set-up labor, charged by the hour per crew member or as a fixed sum. Ask for an estimate of hours and a cap, and ask to be told when the cap is approached.
• Dumpsters. A hoarded house can need several loads. Dumpster rental and disposal are charged by the container, and the number is a genuine unknown until the first one is full. Ask what size the company expects to use and what each costs.
• Specialist cleaning, where there is animal waste, mold, rodents or biohazard. This is a separate trade with its own pricing and is not something an estate sale company does, though many will arrange it.
• The clean-out and final clean after the sale, which for a hoarded house is a large job in its own right. The guide to estate clean-out services explains what a clean-out includes and how to avoid paying for it twice.

Against that, the sale itself often does better than the family expects, because hoarded houses contain a great deal, some of it never used, and the guide to estate sale fees will help you read the rest of the quote. Ask every company for a written estimate that separates the commission from the labor, the dumpsters and the cleaning, and for a worked example of what you would receive if the sale grossed half what they expect. In a hoarded house it is entirely possible for the costs to exceed the proceeds, and you should know before you sign whether the company expects that, and who pays the difference.

What is usually found

Families dread the clearing and are often astonished by what it turns up. A person who could not throw things away also could not throw away the valuable things, and they tend to be in the same layers as everything else. Companies that do this work report finding, routinely:

• Cash, in envelopes, books, coat pockets, coffee cans, the freezer, under the mattress, taped inside drawers. Sometimes a great deal of it, in small amounts across many hiding places.
• Jewelry and coins, often in original boxes or in bags inside other bags.
• Unopened purchases, still in the packaging, sometimes years of them: small appliances, clothes with tags, tools, craft supplies, collectibles bought from television. These sell, and they are the part of a hoarded house that most surprises a family.
• Collections the family did not know existed, bought steadily over decades.
• Documents: savings bonds, stock certificates, insurance policies, a second will, the deed, a safe deposit box key.
• Photographs and letters, in shoeboxes and bags, mixed with everything else.
• The ordinary contents of a house, underneath, which sell as they would anywhere.

The finding is the reason not to clear the house yourselves in a hurry, and it is also why a company's sorting fee is often money well spent. The guide to hidden value and overlooked treasures lists the ordinary-looking things that turn out to be worth checking, and in a hoarded house there are more of them, buried deeper.

Keeping the family safe

A hoarded house is physically dangerous in ways an ordinary house is not, and the danger is easy to underestimate because the family has been walking through it for years. Before anyone spends a day sorting:

• The structure. Paper and books are heavy. Floors sag, stairs give, piles fall. Stay out of any room where the floor feels soft, and do not pull from the bottom of a stack.
• The air. Dust, mold, rodent droppings and animal waste all go into the air when the piles are moved. A fitted respirator mask, not a paper one, and gloves, for everyone, every day. Open the windows. Anyone with asthma or a weak immune system should not be in the house at all while it is disturbed.
• Sharps and chemicals. Needles, broken glass, old medication, pesticides, paint, cleaning products, gas cans, and in some houses ammunition. Assume they are there. Do not put a bare hand into anything you cannot see the bottom of.
• Animals and pests. Rodents, roaches, fleas and the occasional living animal nobody knew about. If there is evidence of infestation, pest control comes before sorting.
• The utilities. Have the electrical panel and any gas appliances checked before the power is used. Extension cords under piles and space heaters against paper are the usual causes of fire in these houses.
• The people. Nobody works alone in the house. Teenagers and children are not brought to help. Everyone takes breaks outside, drinks water, and stops when tired, because tiredness is when someone steps through a floor.

If the house has animal waste, mold, human waste or a strong biological smell, stop and call a specialist cleaning company before anyone sorts anything. That is not squeamishness; it is the difference between a hard week and a hospital visit, and every estate sale company that takes these jobs will tell you the same.

The paperwork you must find first

In an ordinary house the important papers are in the desk. In a hoarded house they are in the desk, and also in the third bag from the left in the second bedroom, and in the glovebox, and in a purse under the kitchen table. Unopened mail in particular can go back years and contain checks, tax notices, insurance renewals and statements from accounts nobody knew about.

Whoever is sorting, family or crew, checks every envelope, every box, every book that falls open, every pocket, and sets aside anything with a name or a number on it. The priorities, in order, are the will or trust; the deed and any titles; bank, brokerage and retirement statements; insurance policies; tax returns; unopened mail; and identification documents. Everything else waits. The guide to what to do with documents, photos and personal papers gives the full list of what to keep, what to shred and what buyers legitimately want, and it applies here with the volume turned up. If you are the executor, the guide to an executor's duties for personal property explains why the records matter beyond the family; the rules vary by state, and this is general guidance, not legal advice.

Doing it yourselves, or hiring it out

Some families do the first pass themselves, to save the sorting fee or because they want to be the ones who find the letters. It can work, on three conditions: the house is a hoard of things rather than of waste, there are enough of you to work in pairs for many days, and you follow the method above rather than filling a dumpster. Plan in weeks, not weekends. Rent the dumpster only after the papers and valuables are out. Photograph anything you are unsure about before it goes.

Most families, in our experience of what companies and families say afterwards, are better served by hiring the sorting and keeping their own effort for the decisions: what to keep, what to let go. The sorting is hard, unpleasant, slow and dangerous, and a crew that does it every month is faster and finds more. The family's time is better spent on the boxes the crew sets aside, in a clean room, with a cup of coffee, which is how the photographs and letters ought to be gone through anyway.

Whichever you choose, do not let the shame of the house rush the decision. The companies that do this work have seen worse, they say so kindly, and the only thing that makes it harder for them is a family that cleared the good things into a dumpster before they arrived.

What to do next

Open a path, take photographs of every room, find what papers you can reach safely, and then stop and get help. Describe the estate once, say plainly that it is a hoarded house and what kind, and local estate sale companies will reach out to you, free; the ones that reply are the ones willing to consider it. Ask each what they would do first, what they charge for sorting and dumpsters, and who pays if the costs exceed the sale. Then read the guide to clean-out services for the part of the job that comes after the sale, and the guide to documents, photos and personal papers before the first sorting day.

Frequently asked questions