Yard Sale Tips

Try these yard sale tips to help make your adventures in private sales more successful and enjoyable.

These tips have been learned by watching others with experience, and getting involved with private sales that are generally held on the weekends.

Try some of these tips and see if they don't make your private sales adventures more pleasant and satisfying.


Here is a healthy list of yard sale tips for your success:

• One way to identifying the quality of items for sale is location. Generally, nice areas tend to have nice things, and not so nice areas tend to have not so nice things.

• Trailer courts and apartment complexes tend not to have many things of interest. Also, the sales aren't usually located conveniently.

• The price of everything at a yard sale is negotiable.

• Here are a few ways to approach making an offer:

  “Will you take $(dollar figure) for this?”
  

  “I’ll give you $(dollar figure) for this (name the item).”
  

  “You’re asking $5 for this widget, I’m willing to pay $3 for it.”

• Prices usually are a reflection of what the seller thinks the item is worth. You should buy based on what you think it is worth.

• A general rule is good used household items should not cost more than 25% of their original price when new. Some equipment, appliances and firearms tend to hold their value better, especially if they are only a few years old, and might command something more like 50% of their original retail price.

• Take a partner along to help navigate and share in the fun.

• If the seller is stuck at a certain price for an item, and that price is too high for you, then you can suggest including additional items in the sale to make the value in your eyes more closely match the price that he wants you to pay.

  For example: If you want to buy a tackle box full of fishing lures and the seller won’t budge from the asking price of $35, then perhaps you could suggest throwing in a fishing rod and reel with the tackle box and suggest “That would make it worth it to me”.

• Use Map Quest to plan your route the night before. If you can, make a map of your route according to time and location so that you aren’t doing too much backtracking to visit the sales that are of interest to you.

• When trying to get a good price on multiple items, it is sometimes better to lump things together and offer one price. You can say “I'm interested in this and that and those other four items. Will you take $15 for it all?

  This is a larger sale, so the seller makes more money and gets rid of more things.

  From a seller's perspective, this is desirable.

• Memorizing streets during the winter months is a good exercise that will be helpful during the garage sale season of spring through fall.

• Have a current map of the area so you can find locations advertised in the paper that are unfamiliar to you.

• Unless it is an exceptionally nice sale, with lots of interesting items, you should plan to spend about 5 minutes per sale. Expect to spend about as much time at each sale as you spend getting to each sale.

Done with Yard Sale, take me back to Garage Sales