How to Start an Estate Sale Business: A Realistic Guide

What the business actually is

An estate sale company takes a house full of belongings, turns it into a shop for two or three days, sells as much as it can to the public, and hands the family a check and an empty house. It is paid a share of what sells, commonly somewhere between roughly a third and a half of gross sales, varying by region and by estate. There is usually no fee up front, so the company carries every hour of set-up on the promise of a sale that has not happened yet.

That shape tells you what you are really selling: labor the family cannot face, knowledge they do not have, and a crowd they cannot summon. The labor is sorting forty years of a life into priced lots. The knowledge is knowing that the cast iron skillet at the back of the cabinet sells and the formal china mostly does not. The crowd is the mailing list, the photographs and the reputation that put two hundred people on the lawn at eight on a Friday morning. A new company has the first, can learn the second, and has to build the third from nothing. Our guide to what an estate sale company does describes the product you are about to sell, stage by stage.

One more thing before you spend a dollar. Most of your clients will have just lost someone, and how you speak to a daughter standing in her mother's kitchen decides whether you get the job and whether she tells anyone about you. This is a bereavement business as much as a retail one, and the companies that last treat it that way.

Setting the company up properly

The legal set-up is the easy part, and it belongs before your first sale, because the moment you take money on someone else's behalf you want to be a business and not a person. Rules vary by state and city, and none of this is legal or tax advice; a short meeting with an accountant and an attorney in your own state is the right first purchase.

• Choose a structure and register it. Many operators form a limited liability company so that a claim against the business is not a claim against their house. Register the name, get an employer identification number, and open a business bank account. Family money and sale money must never sit in the same account.
• Find out what your state and city require. As far as we know, most states have no license specific to estate sale companies; general business registration applies, and some cities want a local business license. Where a company sells by auction rather than at tagged prices, many states license auctioneers. Our state pages, for example Texas or South Carolina, say what we know about each state and link to its business register, and the guide to licensing and insurance for an estate sale business goes into detail.
• Ask about sales tax. Whether an estate sale collects it depends on the state. Ask your accountant, get a seller's permit if one is needed, and build the answer into your contract and your checkout.
• Buy insurance before you touch anything. General liability at a minimum, because the public will be walking through a stranger's house on your invitation. Ask about cover for property in your care, and about workers' compensation once you hire. A family is entitled to ask for your certificate and to call the insurer named on it; hand it over gladly.
• Write a contract you would sign yourself. Have an attorney review it once. Our guide to what to put in an estate sale contract covers every clause, and the family-side contract checklist tells you what an informed client will be looking for.

The knowledge that decides whether you survive

Anyone can rent tables. What separates a company that nets the family a good result from one that gives the house away is pricing, and pricing is knowledge: not of antiques in the abstract, but of what things sell for, this year, to the people who turn up at a sale in your county. A new operator's most common error is pricing from retail: the sofa cost four thousand dollars, so surely it is worth a thousand. It is worth what a buyer will pay on Saturday, which may be a fraction of that and depends on condition, maker and local demand.

You build that knowledge three ways, and none of them is fast. Shop other companies' sales every weekend for a year, first morning and last afternoon, and watch what moves and at what price. Read completed listings on the resale and auction platforms rather than asking prices, because an asking price is a hope. And work a season for an established company if one will have you: a few months on somebody else's set-up crew teaches more than any course. Our guides to what sells best at estate sales, valuing antiques and collectibles and pricing strategy for companies are a start, but they are a start, not a substitute for a year of Saturdays.

Equipment and start-up costs

The house comes with the stock. What you supply is the means of showing it, pricing it and taking money for it, and most of that fits in a van. Buy secondhand where you can; half of it will turn up at the sales you are shopping anyway.

Beyond equipment, budget for insurance, registration, a simple website, business cards for realtors and attorneys, and enough cash to live on while the first sales come in. A new company waits weeks between signing a client and being paid, and that gap finishes many operators who had every other part right.

Setting your rate, your minimum and your terms

Do not set your commission by copying the company across town. Count the hours a typical sale takes from set-up to settlement, multiply by what you have to pay yourself and a crew, add the fixed costs of the business, and look at what an ordinary house in your area actually grosses. That arithmetic gives you the percentage you need and the smallest sale you can afford to take. The second number becomes your minimum, and stating it plainly saves everyone a wasted walk-through. Our guides to how commission works and estate sale minimums explain how families read those numbers.

Decide, too, how you will handle the extras: a clean-out after the sale, card processing fees, a hoarded house that needs a week of sorting, an item that goes to auction instead of the floor. Each is included in your rate, charged separately, or not offered, and your contract should say which. Families are not put off by a fee named in advance. They are put off by one that appears at settlement, and they say so to their realtor.

Quoting a low rate to win early jobs is a legitimate way to build a record, but it has to be a decision, made once, with a date on which the rate goes up. A company that undercuts on every job out of fear is working weekends for less than the crew it hired.

Finding your first clients

Most families call the first name someone they know gives them: a realtor, a probate attorney, a senior-living community, a move manager, a hospice social worker or a friend who used a company last year. Building a business means becoming that name, which takes a year of showing up, and the guide to how to get estate sale leads covers each of those sources in turn.

While that year runs, take the leads that come to you free. Families use this site to describe an estate once; the site emails the five nearest companies directly, other local companies can see the request too, and the family can close it whenever they like. Joining is free: free leads and free sale listings, no per-lead charge, no listing fee, and no card needed to join. Your profile states your own claims about insurance and years in business, attributed to you, and families are told to ask for the certificate, so keep it accurate and keep it ready.

Then treat every sale as advertising for the next one. Your name is on every sign and tag, and the shoppers who come through will one day have a parent's house to clear. Collect email addresses at checkout, photograph every room well, and publish a listing that shows up when someone searches for sales in your town; our guide to photos and listings that draw buyers is about exactly that.

Running your first sale

Choose a first house you can handle. A tidy three-bedroom with a full kitchen, a garage and forty years of ordinary furniture is a better first sale than a large house with real antiques: the risk of an expensive mistake is lower and the crowd is just as good. Agree in writing what the family is removing and by when, and photograph everything before your crew touches it.

Give yourself twice the set-up time you think you need. Empty every closet, lay out the kitchen on tables, and set personal papers and photographs aside for the family rather than pricing them. Price everything; an unpriced item is one every shopper will ask about. Put the checkout by the exit and the small valuables in cases within sight of it.

On sale day you need a person on the door, a cashier, someone to wrap, and enough eyes on the floor to see every room. Do not run a first sale alone. Our guides to staffing an estate sale and liability and safety cover the crew and the hazards, and managing the opening rush covers the first hour, which is where a first sale most often goes wrong. Settle with the family within days, with an itemized statement, and ask them while it is fresh whether they would mind being a reference.

The mistakes that end companies in year one

Estate sale companies rarely fail because nobody wanted an estate sale. They fail in a few familiar ways, and most are avoidable if you know what they look like in advance.

• Pricing from the family's memory instead of the market. A house priced at what things cost twenty years ago sells nothing on Friday, is marked down in a panic on Sunday, and leaves the family a small check and a full house.
• Taking every job. A house with too little in it to cover your costs is a weekend you paid to work. A minimum, stated kindly and early, is what protects you.
• Mixing money. Proceeds in a personal account, a settlement paid late because rent came out first, a statement that cannot be reconciled. One late payout is a story a family tells everyone, and it is how companies end up in court.
• No paper. A handshake deal over what the family is keeping, then a dispute over a ring that was or was not in the drawer. Write down what is excluded, count the cases every evening, and keep the records the guide to estate sale records describes.
• Uninsured. A shopper falls on the basement stairs. Without cover, that is the business and possibly your house.
• Working the crowd, not the client. A company that is curt with a grieving daughter because it is busy runs good sales for people who never recommend it. Read working with grieving families.

What to do next

Get the contract in front of an attorney and spend the next several weekends at other people's sales with a notebook. When you are ready to be found, list your company so that families in your area who describe an estate can reach you, and read how to get estate sale leads and what to put in your contract before the first call comes in.

Frequently asked questions