When you are thinking about running a garage sale you know that you want to make as much money as you can, but how can you really maximize your earnings?
There’s more to a great yard sale than simply throwing everything out into the driveway, so take a moment to consider these tips and tricks.
How to Run a Great Garage Sale
Promote your Garage Sale
Promoting your yard sale is probably the most important thing you can do to be sure it is successful. This is especially important if you are located in a part of town that is a little harder to get to and which does not have a lot of through traffic.
Try to Have A Multi-Family Garage Sale
Can you get your neighbors involved? See if they want to put out a table with items for sale in their own driveway? The more the merrier, especially if your homes are side by side or very close.
Simply being able to advertise it as a two- or three-family sale can make a huge difference to the number of people who show up.
If people can drive to one spot, park once, then walk around the block seeing everything everyone has for sale, it’s almost a guarantee more people will come by.
Get your Garage Sale Items Ready Early
You can certainly throw together a yard sale very quickly, but you are much better off to gather things over time and then set a sale date.
As soon as you know that you want to have a yard sale, even if it will not be for months, you’ll find that you should start gathering things up.
If you have a spare corner in the garage or a spare bedroom or office, put every single thing you want to sell in there. That alone will save time in the long run.
Storing smaller garage sale items in stackable containers makes a lot of sense. You will end up with extra storage containers for the future or you can sell those too.
Start marking off the items that you want to move, and make sure that they get price tags on them. Pricing things early helps as well; it will reduce the pressure in the days leading up to the sale.
If you have items you haven’t used in one year, seriously consider getting rid of them.
Advertise your Yard Sale
See, this one is so important we are mentioning it twice. You simply cannot overlook properly advertising your garage sale.
There are a lot of ways to advertise a yard sale. Start with the local paper; there are plenty of bargain hunters who never bother to look online.
Also remember to hit up local services like Facebook. Advertise in local Facebook groups and also dedicated Garage Sale pages.
Make sure that you put out plenty of physical Garage Sale signs in the days leading up to the sale, and also remember to advertise on your social networks the morning of your sale.
And keep tweeting or Instagramming your sale as it is going on. You may have more people that stop by as a result.
And remember, after your sale is over, go out and take down any signage you put up. Not only will it stop people from continuing to come by your home, it’s the right thing to do.
Price your Garage Sale Items to Sell
Look, the reason you are even having a yard sale is to get rid of stuff, right? So, price things properly. That old laser computer printer may be worth $300 to you.
But, if you bought a cheap printer because you didn’t want to have to replace expensive printer toner cartridges, then sell the old printer for a cheap price.
Don’t think of pricing it at $100 and expect to sell it. Just because you paid the going rate at the time, does not mean anyone else will pay you enough to think of getting your money back. Or even close.
Price everything you want to sell
You can get by with a few containers that state that everything inside is 25 cents, but the truth of the matter is that you are going to be in much better shape if you just label everything.
It will be too hard to track which bin a particular item came from. One way to get around this is to sell the entire bin with the contents for a marked price. That may help sell the items faster as well.
You can purchase price labels from a store, or you can simply write the price on a little piece of masking tape.
This helps you keep things speedy when they come to pay. You will also find that marking the price on a piece of tape can help you keep track of what you sold. When you sell and item, remove the tape from the item and put it on a handy piece of paper.
At the end of your sale, add up the money from your taped sheets and there is your garage sale money!
What to do with Yard Sale Items that Didn’t Sell
What can you do with left over items that did not sell at your garage sale? Only you can decide whether to keep hanging onto these items.
If you have a lot left over, maybe you want to have another sale? If you do, consider pricing those items lower in order to get rid of them. Here’s another suggestion.
Simply load everything that did not sell into boxes and bring them to your local thrift store. Let them decide what they want to keep and what they want to toss into the recycle bins.
Remember, you didn’t even want these items! That is why you chose to sell them in the first place. Do your local thrift store and yourself a favor and donate them. This gives you less clutter and more room in your home.
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