Five Tips for Creating the Best Yard Sale Ever
One: Find a space for your yard sale and clean it well. The way you represent your items will have an effect on how they sale. If you have them in a small, cluttered and dirty or dusty space, they are not going to be very appealing to a potential buyer. If you are using the garage, organize it in an appealing manner, clean surface tops where items will be displayed, and get rid of dust and grime. Look at the place you will be placing your items for sale through the eyes of the buyer. You may have been in your garage (or other designated selling spot) so many times that you have become immune to the twelve thousand empty cans along the wall but newcomers will spot them, or any other offenses, immediately and it will affect their frame of mind for purchasing.
Two: Go through your house with a fine-tooth comb to select items that you want to sell. This is the most time-consuming process of getting ready for the yard sale. Go through bookcases and select books you no longer read, closets, drawers, chests and armoires for clothing you no longer wear, toy boxes for toys you’d like to get rid of, shoe racks for shoes you will never wear again, sewing baskets for material and other sewing items you no longer need, CD and Video racks, tool chest, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, etc. Do not forget to look in storage rooms that are often forgotten such as utility rooms, barns and sheds to detect which items you have that you could easily part with. Once you have completed your house search, do a basic run-through in your rooms one more time on the following day to search out any items you may have overlooked. Make sure all items for sale are clean and in good condition.
Three: Purchase a sticker gun or peel-and-stick price stickers and price items as you select them for the yard sale. This will save you a bundle of time getting ready. It is much easier to price items as you go than it is to have a whole bunch of things to price at once and you are more objective in your pricing if you do it as you go.
Four: Organize the sale. Figure out how you are going to set up your items for the highest appeal. You can, for example, have various tables with all items on them being the same price. Or you can have a table with disposable grocery bags next to them and a set price to fill the bag. The latter example works great with small, bulky items such as baby clothing; Fill a bag for $2.00. Or you can have them in order of size, fragility, etc. Having some sense of order, however, works well for you in two ways. One it sets a nice tone for the purchaser and two it allows you for easier storing of unsold items once the yard sale is complete.
Five: Advertise, advertise, advertise. You see the signs all over the place during this time of year that advertise a yard sale. These signs are effective. Just be sure to remember to take them down after the sale is over. Another way to advertise that can be even more effective is to put an advertisement in the local newspaper. There are people who watch these ads diligently in searching for yard sales. Note a light overview of what will be offered, give the times you will be open for selling and note the address. You may want to collaborate with your neighbors as well and have them either stage their own yard sale at the same time as yours or come on over and combine sales with you on one lot. Advertising these methods will help to ensure your sale is one of the first visited by those who are not only watching the newspaper advertisements, but also for those who happen to be driving by. While it may be easy to drive by a single yard sale, seeing three or four yard sales in a row or coming across one well advertised massive yard sale can prove impossible to resist for most any driver. Just remember to have a very separate and organized system for collecting monies if you are combining sales onto one property.
All in all, yard sales can be fun and profitable if you take the proper measures to ensure their success.
