Selling a House: A How-To Guide for Post-Bubble Times-Minyanville

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Selling a House: A How-To Guide for Post-Bubble Times

Carol Kopp Jun 17, 2009 11:00 am


		Three steps to sold.

Here’s how we sold the house:

Step 1: Clear the House

An estate sale home is a subtle turnoff, with its out-of-date furnishings, photos of children long grown and gone, and other people’s mementos.

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Your goal is to make the space clean, uncluttered, and light-filled. If you do it right, you can make enough money clearing the place to pay for basic cosmetic improvements.

Prepare for your massive estate-clearance-indoor-outdoor sale to be advertised on Craigslist.

Identify items that might have collectible value. People collect amazing stuff: cast-iron frying pans, Halloween decorations, rhinestone jewelry, rusty tools with no contemporary purpose. Then there’s the really good stuff: fine crystal and porcelain, jewelry (including costume jewelry, if it’s vintage and signed with a maker’s name), and rare books.

If you’re not into this stuff, get a friend in to look the place over. Collectible freaks love sorting through piles of junk. You can also search for similar items under “completed listings” on eBay (EBAY). If you think you have valuable antique furniture, take pictures to an auction gallery and ask if they’re interested, but don’t get your hopes up.

Anything that's fairly valuable and signed with a maker’s name, or otherwise easily describable, is best sold on eBay.

Everything else goes in the estate sale.

Staples (SPLS) sells packets of price tags and boxes of plastic bags -- the kind that say: “Thank You For Shopping Here!” Collect old newspapers for wrapping.

Tag everything in the house, and keep prices dirt cheap. The more you’re stuck with, the more you’ll pay to get it hauled away. Used furniture is almost worthless. You might get $20 for a nice couch, and $10 for an upholstered chair. Ask $15 for a set of dinnerware, and a dime for a glass. Small appliances might be $5, and a lawnmower $10. At the end of the day, you’ll wind up with a startling amount of cash.

And you’ll be amazed at what people will buy. Two people inquired about a wilted begonia in a plastic pot that was sitting on a windowsill. I had to hide the cat, and get a volunteer to guard her.

If your prices are low enough, people will stagger out of the house under piles of stuff, and at the end of the day the house will be much emptier.

Afterward, donate useful things in good condition to a charity. Then hire a trash hauler to finish the job.

A final word: On the day of the sale, post a friend in every room. You’re inviting the general public in, and there are crazy people out there.

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Carol Kopp

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06-17-2009, 4:23 pm
Absolutely, In fact, you might as well sort through all the clothing at once and haul it off to a charity thrift shop. The chance of finding buyers on your sale day for any particular size and style is dim, while a thrift shop can get the stuff into Read More

Amy M

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06-17-2009, 7:40 pm
This piece is such a refreshing change from "We invested $10K for (dubious) upgrades and now it's worth X amount. We're waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the market to come back so we can sell." I'm gla Read More

Joan Spisso

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06-17-2009, 10:46 pm
This was a well-organized project. I'd speculate that many families cannot work together, in such circumstances, with result that pleasant outcomes become impossible to achieve. I understand what was involved, physically, with what you went Read More

Elliott Snyder

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06-18-2009, 6:31 pm
We just received a contract on our mother's Pennsylvania condo after nearly 9 months on the markets. The Pa 4.5% estate tax would have been more onerous, had our mother not been living in assisted living and NH for several years before her dea Read More

Carol Kopp

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06-18-2009, 6:50 pm
Just fyi: The link to Bank Rate Monitor in the story (http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/state/state_tax_home.asp), gets you to a page from which you select a state. For each state, income tax info is displayed but there are tabs for the state's Read More


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