Estate Sale vs. Consignment: Which Pays You More?

How each one works

An estate sale is a sale of a household's contents held in the house itself, usually run by a company that sorts, prices and advertises everything and staffs the sale days. The company is paid a commission on gross sales, commonly somewhere between roughly a third and a half, varying by region and by estate, and the family receives the balance at settlement a week or two after the last day. Whatever does not sell is dealt with at the end: bought out, donated, or hauled away. The commission guide explains what moves the rate.

Consignment is a different arrangement. You hand a piece to a shop, a dealer or a specialist who displays it, sells it when a buyer comes along, and pays you an agreed share of the price. Nothing is sold until somebody wants it, and nothing is paid until it sells. Most agreements drop the price on a schedule and return or dispose of the piece if it has not sold by a set date.

The two are not really competitors. An estate sale is a way to empty a house. Consignment is a way to sell particular things patiently. The question a family is actually asking is which one suits what they have and how quickly they need it gone, and often the answer is a bit of both.

Speed: a weekend versus a season

An estate sale is fast by design. From the first walk-through to an empty house is commonly two to five weeks, most of it preparation, and the selling itself takes two to four days. The date is fixed in advance, buyers come to it, and the company's incentive is to sell as much as it can in that window.

Consignment is slow, and the slowness is the point. A good shop waits for the buyer who will pay a proper price for a particular piece rather than the buyer who happens to be in the house on Saturday. A dining table might sell in a fortnight or sit for four months. Most agreements run sixty to ninety days with scheduled markdowns, after which the piece comes back to you or is disposed of. A family that needs the money by a deadline cannot count on any of it.

There is a second kind of speed to think about: yours. An estate sale needs one decision, one contract and one settlement. Consignment needs a decision per piece, transport per piece, and a monthly statement to read from each shop. For a family managing an estate from out of state, that is a real difference, and the guide to managing an estate sale from out of state is largely about limiting the number of things that need attending to.

Fees, and what you actually keep

Both routes take a percentage, and the percentages are not directly comparable because they apply to different things. An estate sale commission applies to everything sold in the house, including the thousands of small items that carry the sale but would never be worth consigning. A consignment split applies only to the pieces you chose to consign, and the shop's share is often in the same range as an estate sale commission, sometimes higher for small or low-value items and sometimes lower for a valuable piece the shop is keen to have.

What decides which leaves you with more is the price achieved, not the percentage. A consignment shop may sell a good sofa for a figure an estate sale would not reach, because its buyers are furnishing homes rather than hunting bargains, and because it can wait. It may also mark it down three times and sell it for less than the estate sale would have, months later, after you have paid to move it there. The estate sale sells the same sofa this weekend at whatever the tag says by Sunday.

The guide to when you get paid after an estate sale covers what a settlement should look like, and the same standard applies to a consignment statement: what sold, for how much, what was deducted, and what you received.

Effort: who does the work

With an estate sale company, the family's work is mostly done before the company arrives: deciding what to keep, gathering documents and photographs, and reading the contract. The company does the rest. The contract checklist and the guide to what to keep cover the two parts that are yours.

Consignment puts more on you. You have to know which pieces are worth consigning, find the right shop for each (a furniture consignment store, a jeweler, an art dealer and a vintage clothing shop are four different businesses), photograph or bring the pieces in for assessment, agree terms, deliver them, and keep track of them until they sell or come back. Done well it is a part-time job for a month.

If you run your own estate sale rather than hiring a company, the comparison changes: you are doing the work either way, and the question becomes whether a weekend of selling in the house beats a season of selling through shops. For most households it does, because the house has to be emptied regardless. The guide to running your own estate sale shows what that weekend involves.

Which items suit consignment

Consignment earns its slowness on pieces that a patient, specific buyer will pay well for and an estate sale crowd may not. The shop's advantage is its audience and its time; the items that benefit are the ones where a week of exposure in the wrong room costs real money.

• Fine jewelry and watches. An estate sale sells jewelry from a locked case on a busy morning, often to dealers. A jeweler or a specialist consignor can sell a good piece to a retail buyer at a retail-secondhand price. The guide to selling jewelry from an estate explains how to tell which pieces are worth the trouble.
• Art with a name attached. Signed paintings, original prints and sculpture by known artists do better through a dealer who knows the market than on a wall between the coats and the lamps. Selling art from an estate covers what is worth checking first.
• Designer and mid-century furniture. A named maker, a documented design or a good-condition piece from a sought-after period has buyers who search for it and shops that specialize in it. See what mid-century furniture is worth.
• Designer clothing, handbags and accessories in good condition, which have a dedicated resale market and sell poorly to a general estate sale crowd.

The common thread is that each of these has a specific buyer who is not necessarily at an estate sale, and a value high enough to justify the transport and the wait. A piece worth a few hundred dollars rarely repays the effort; a piece worth a few thousand often does. If you are not sure which side of that line something falls on, how to find out if something is valuable shows the ways to check before deciding.

Which items suit an estate sale

Almost everything else. Ordinary furniture, kitchenware, linens, tools, books, garden equipment, decor, small appliances, the contents of the garage and the basement, holiday decorations, craft supplies, and the thousand small things that fill a house are estate sale goods. No shop will consign them, and no family has the time to sell them one by one. An estate sale is the only route that turns all of it into money in a weekend, and the guide to what sells best at estate sales shows that some of it sells surprisingly well.

An estate sale also suits the good pieces when the family needs speed more than the last dollar. A house that has to be listed by the end of the month cannot wait ninety days for a consignment shop to find a buyer for the dining set. And a good estate sale company reaches many of the same buyers a shop would, through the listing sites and its own mailing list. The estate sale vs. auction guide covers the third route for the highest-value pieces, which is often the better choice than consignment for anything with real competition among buyers.

Using both without losing money

The families who do best with both routes decide early and tell everyone. The sequence that works is this:

1. Walk through the house with a list, before anything is moved, and mark the handful of pieces that might be worth consigning or sending to auction. If the list is longer than a dozen items, it is probably too long.
2. Have those pieces looked at, either by the estate sale companies you invite to walk through, by a specialist, or by an appraiser if the value could be high. Appraisal vs. estate sale pricing explains when a paid appraisal is worth it.
3. Decide, piece by piece, whether each goes to a shop, to auction, or stays in the sale. Put the decision in the estate sale contract so the company knows what it is and is not selling.
4. Let the estate sale company run the sale with everything else, and take the consigned pieces to the shops on your own schedule.

The order matters because of a mistake that is easy to make in the other direction: consigning the best pieces first, then calling a company about a house that has been picked over. A company quotes on what it can see, and a home stripped of its top items will draw a higher rate, a minimum, or a refusal. The guide to why companies turn down sales lists that among the common reasons. Pulling the best pieces is fine; pulling them silently is what costs you.

The risks of each route

The risk of an estate sale is selling something for less than it was worth because it was priced in a hurry, or in a house where the right buyer did not happen to come. Good companies reduce that risk with research and advertising, and the family reduces it further by asking about the top pieces at the walk-through and reading the pricing in the contract. The risk is real but bounded: the sale happens, the house empties, and the money arrives.

The risk of consignment is the opposite. A piece can sit for months, be marked down to a fraction of its starting price, come back damaged, or simply be lost track of. The statement may be wrong and you may not notice. Every one of those is manageable with a written agreement, a photograph of each piece at handover and a calendar reminder for each end date, but every one of them needs you to manage it. If you will not have the attention to do that, an estate sale that sells everything this month is the safer route even if a shop might have done better on paper.

What to do next

Start with the house, not the individual pieces. Describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free, and their walk-throughs will tell you which pieces, if any, deserve a slower route. Bring the questions to ask an estate sale company and ask each one specifically what it would do with your best three items. If you decide to consign some pieces, how to value antiques and collectibles will help you set a realistic starting price before the shop sets one for you.

Frequently asked questions