Planning an estate sale can be difficult. That is why most professionals recommend hiring someone to help organize everything except the smallest sales. If you are planning on organizing your own estate sale, it is important that you understand the steps required for your sale to be a success.

In this two-part series, we will look at the road map to successful estate sales by highlighting the six most important milestones you need to achieve: organizing, appraising, advertising, displaying, hosting, and cleaning.

In this post, we will look at the first three, all of which should occur before the day of the sale.

Organizing
The first step when hosting an estate sale is to organize your items. Go through the items to be sold and create a complete inventory. Take special care to note which items are damaged and if that damage is repairable. Also, keep an inventory of the items you don’t plan on selling.
These lists will become invaluable, allowing you the ultimate organizational resource later down the line. They will allow you to keep track of what needs mending, what’s been sold, and what might need to be repriced over the course of your sale.

Appraising
Estate appraisal services are an invaluable tool when it comes time to set the prices. While some items you will be able to determine the price of simply by visiting another estate sale, there are other items that can be more — or less — valuable than you realize.

Estate sales are prime spots for professional collectors, who often arrive hours before the scheduled start of a sale to stake out the best deals and rarest items. While you want to be pricing fairly, you should also ensure that your ignorance is not being exploited.

Professional appraisals will assist you in determining the full value of your products and help you determine a price that reflects your possessions’ value.

Advertising
After you have the appraisals, you can begin advertising. You can’t sell anything if no one shows up, after all. Taking high-quality photos and using the information for the appraisals to create top quality fliers, internet advertisements, and social media posts can really help your efforts towards a successful estate sale.
This concludes our first post in this series. To learn more about how to plan a successful estate sale, look for the second half in this series.