12 Tips for Hosting the Perfect Garage Sale

By Lorena Roberts on September 30, 2017

We all have too much stuff. Your closet doors probably won’t shut. Your bookshelf is full of books you haven’t even read. And I don’t even want to see what’s under your bed. If you’re in the mood to “purge” a lot of your stuff very quickly, I suggest having a garage sale.

There are rules and tips to hosting the perfect garage sale. If you’re thinking of taking the plunge, you have to really commit yourself to making it happen. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up with a bunch of junk sitting in the corner of your garage, waiting to be tagged and organized.

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1. Pick a date

This is how you ensure you’re committed to hosting a garage sale. Put it on your calendar and start advertising right away. If you make a deal with yourself to host this event, you’re more likely to follow through if you have the day and time already picked out.

2. Sort and price your items

You don’t want to answer 5,000 questions in all forms of “How much is this?” all day, so make things easy for you and the customer by ensuring prices are listed on all of your items.

Sort your items based on what they are. Don’t put the jewelry in with the tools, or the baby clothes next to the deck furniture.

3. Have change on hand

Most people carry $20 bills around with them. Chances are, you’re going to have to give a lot of change to your first few customers. Remember that when you’re setting up shop and stop by the bank!

4. Invite some friends to join in

Chances are, your friends have more stuff than they need as well. Invite them to join you! The more stuff you have at a garage sale, the more likely it is for people to stop by and look through your stuff.

Some of the most successful yard sales come from neighborhoods that decide to do one big event over a weekend. The more people that pitch in, the bigger your audience is going to be, therefore the bigger chances you have of selling all the crap you no longer need.

5. Advertise as much as you can

Utilize places like Craigslist and FB Marketplace to get the word out that you’re having a garage sale! When you post, include pictures of stuff that will be there, the address, directions, and times.

If you’re going to make signs, make sure they’re attractive and catch the eye. There’s no point in creating cardboard signs — everybody knows that’s trashy.

6. Accept cards

You’ll get a LOT more offers and you’ll make a LOT more money if you have the means to accept cards. Some people like to use the excuse, “I don’t have that much cash on me” as a way to get out of a sale. TRAP THEM. Before they can escape your grasp, politely let them know that you’re able to accept cards as well.

Ka-ching.

7. Organize, organize, organize

If it looks like you’ve just got heaps of junk sitting around, no one’s going to want to stop in. There’s something about disorganization that turns people off completely and immediately. If you want your garage sale to be successful, organize literally everything.

This means for clothes, all the sizes should be stacked together and separated by article. Put DVDs in genre piles so little kiddos aren’t looking at the horror movies.

8. Make a plan for anything that goes unsold

This is important. The whole reason you’re having a garage sale is so you don’t have to deal with all this extra stuff. If you don’t have a plan for what you’ll do with anything unsold, you’ll end up with it back in your house.

9. Make sure everything is clean

No one really wants to buy a blender that has a few inches of dust on it. What a turn off. If you’re trying your hardest to sell the things you don’t use anymore, at least take the time to make sure they’re presentable.

10. Enlist help

This is a big task you’re taking on — don’t feel like you have to do it alone! Kids, parents, friends, and family. Offer to add their stuff to the pile if they’d like to pitch in and help. You could probably talk your smallest cousins into helping for a free DVD or some ice cream!

11. Don’t crowd the customers

The worst part about garage sale shopping is the hassle you get from the families who want you to buy their stuff. If someone doesn’t look interested, don’t try to talk them into buying something. They’ll just be overly annoyed.

12. Refuse to “hold items”

If they want it, they should buy it right then (unless, of course, it’s some kind of large ticket item that won’t fit in the car). Refusing to hold stuff for later forces people to make a decision right then and there about whether or not they want that item. You can thank me later.

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