How to List Your Own Estate Sale Online (Free Options)

Where to list an estate sale you are running yourself

Buyers who go to estate sales every weekend do not find them by driving around. They check the same few places on Wednesday or Thursday, decide where they are going, and plan a route. If your sale is not in those places, the people who spend the most money at estate sales will never know it happened. The places that matter:

• Estate sale listing sites. The dedicated sites that list sales by area, with photos and dates, are where the regulars look first. Some charge a fee to list, some are free. You can list your sale free on this site at list your own sale: it gets its own page, up to 200 photos, and the street address is hidden until 24 hours before the sale by default, and the same page appears in the browse page shoppers use to find sales near them, including the ones who have asked for email alerts in your area.
• Local online classifieds and marketplace groups. Free, wide, and full of people who have never been to an estate sale. Good for reach, less good for the serious buyers, and the source of most of the awkward messages covered below.
• Neighborhood and community groups. A post in the local group brings neighbors, who come early, buy the everyday things, and tell their friends.
• Signs. Still the way a large share of shoppers find a sale on the day. Corner signs with an arrow and the dates, put out the morning of the sale and taken down after, within whatever your town's rules allow. The guide to advertising an estate sale yourself covers signs and print in detail.

List in more than one place, and make sure every listing says the same thing: same dates, same hours, same rules. A buyer who reads one listing saying Friday and another saying Saturday will go somewhere else.

What a listing needs

A good listing answers, in order, the four questions a buyer asks: when, where roughly, what, and on what terms. Everything else is decoration.

Leave out anything that makes the house identifiable before the address is released: the house number in a photo of the porch, a street sign in the background, a distinctive mailbox. And leave out the price of everything. A listing that prices every item invites two weeks of "will you take less" messages and gives away the sale-day negotiation before it starts. Naming a few prices on the big pieces, or saying "priced to sell", is enough.

Keeping the street address private until the sale

Professional companies rarely publish the address of a sale more than a day ahead, and neither should you. A listing that says "everything must go" and shows a house full of tools, silver and electronics, with the address under it, is an advertisement to the wrong people for a house that is often empty in the evenings. It also invites early birds who knock on the door on Thursday asking to "just take a look", which is a real nuisance and, for a family in the middle of a bereavement, a distressing one.

The practice is to give the city and the general area in the listing, and release the street address the day before the sale, or the morning of. Listing sites that are built for estate sales do this for you on a schedule; on this site the address is hidden until 24 hours before the sale by default, and you can choose a different window. On classifieds and social media you do it by hand: post the listing without the address and edit it the evening before, or post the address as a fresh message on the morning. Either way, decide the policy before you post and say it in the listing ("address posted Thursday evening"), so that nobody has to ask.

The same thinking applies to the house itself. The guide to estate sale security covers what to lock away, where to put the cash box and how to watch the doors on the day; the address policy is the part of that which starts the moment the listing goes live.

Photos that bring people to the sale

Buyers choose sales by photographs. A listing with six blurry pictures of a living room gets skipped in favor of one with eighty clear pictures of specific things, and the regulars will drive an hour for a sale whose photographs show what they collect. So photograph more than feels necessary, and photograph the items rather than the rooms.

1. Set the house up first. Clear the surfaces, put like with like, and get everything you are selling out where it can be seen. Photograph the sale as the buyer will find it, not the house as it was lived in.
2. Start with the best things. The first few photos are what appear in the preview and what most people judge by. Lead with the furniture, the tools, the jewelry, the collections, whatever is strongest.
3. Shoot in daylight, straight on, close enough to read a label. Open the curtains, turn on the lamps, and hold the phone steady. A maker's mark, a brand name, a pattern name on the underside of a plate: one photo each. Those are the pictures collectors search for.
4. Show groups, then details. A shelf of glassware as one photo, then the two or three best pieces close up. A workbench as one photo, then the power tools individually.
5. Cover every category. Kitchen, linens, books, garage, garden, holiday decorations, clothing. Someone is looking for each of them, and a category with no photo reads as a category you do not have.
6. Leave out people, pets, personal papers and anything not for sale. If Grandmother's portrait is staying with the family, it should not be in the picture over the sofa that is not.

The guide to photographing an estate sale so people actually come goes into lighting, order and the photos that draw specific kinds of buyer. If you have 150 good photos, post 150; a listing site that allows 200 allows it for a reason.

Writing the description

The description is not a eulogy and not a sales pitch. It is a list of what is there, written by someone who has looked. Name the categories and the highlights in plain words: "Mid-century dining set, two bedroom sets, a good selection of hand and power tools, a large collection of vinyl records, vintage Pyrex, sewing machine and fabric, Christmas decorations, ladies' clothing, garden tools, a riding mower." Add the words a searching buyer would type: the names of makers you can identify, the type of collection, the era of the furniture. Where you are not sure, say what you see ("marked sterling", "appears to be oak") rather than guessing at more.

Then say who is running the sale and how. "Family-run sale; everything in the house is for sale unless marked. Cash and cards. Bring help for large furniture; we cannot load. Numbers handed out at 8 a.m. Friday; doors open at 9." A paragraph like that tells experienced buyers exactly what to expect, and it heads off most of the questions. If you are unsure what to price things at once they arrive, the pricing guide for common household items and the guide to running your own estate sale cover that side; the listing's job is only to get people through the door.

How to answer the messages

Once a listing is live, messages arrive, and most of them fall into a handful of types. Decide your answers in advance so that you are not making policy at eleven at night.

• "Can I come early and see the X?" No. Everyone sees it at the same time on the first day. A polite one-line reply and no further discussion.
• "Will you hold the X for me?" No, unless they pay in full now and you have a way to take payment, and even then most families find it simpler to say the sale is first come, first served.
• "What is the price of the X?" If you have priced it, you can say. If you have not, say prices are on the items at the sale. Do not negotiate by message; whatever you agree with one person, the next person in line will argue about.
• "I'll buy everything, what do you want for the lot?" This is a liquidator or a dealer, and it can be a real option if you want the house empty fast. Ask them to come and make an offer in person after the sale, or read estate buyout vs. estate sale before you answer.
• "Can you ship it?" Usually no for a family sale. Say local pickup only.
• "I'll pay by check and my mover will collect it." Overpayment and check schemes target sale listings constantly. Payment is in person, at the sale, and nobody collects anything before it is paid for.

Answer within a day, be brief, and stay kind. Most people asking are ordinary buyers who want to know whether the drive is worth it. If the listing site routes messages through its own form rather than exposing your email or phone, use it; on this site buyers write through the sale page's contact form, and the seller's name is never shown on the page.

When to post, and what to update

Post the listing seven to ten days before the first day, when the regulars begin planning their weekend. Earlier than two weeks and it is forgotten; later than four or five days and the serious buyers have committed elsewhere. Add photos as you finish staging rooms; a listing that grows draws people back. The evening before, release the address and, if your listing has the option, post a reminder. On the last day, if you are discounting, say so in the listing in the morning. And when the sale is over, mark it ended or take it down, because a listing that stays up sends people to a house that is now empty and, sometimes, sold to someone else.

What to do next

Stage the house, take the photographs, and write the description in an afternoon, then post it in at least two places with the address held back. If you have not decided whether to run the sale yourself, read how to run your own estate sale first; it is more work than the listing suggests. And if it turns out to be more than you want to take on, describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free, to quote for doing the whole thing. When you are ready to post, list your sale here, free, with the address hidden until the day before.

Frequently asked questions