It’s so true: Some things in life you just can’t put a price on.
… Until you have to. When it’s up to you to liquidate the contents of your parents’ home, you need to price the priceless.
How much for that baby grand piano Mom used to play? How much for the sideboard that held the food for every Thanksgiving dinner you can remember? How much for the porch swing Dad built?
When selling is unthinkable but necessary, it may be helpful to call in outside experts.
When I cleared out my parents’ Southern California home last year, several months after they had moved into assisted living, I didn’t call on experts. I didn’t want to give anyone a cut of the profits, which were going straight into my parents’ long-term care fund. But looking back — which is another way of saying wising up — I can see the value of experts.
Barry Gordon, founder of the MaxSold company, puts it bluntly: “Things are worth what people will pay.” A 4-year-old Canadian company, whose reach now extends to five states in the Northeast, plus Georgia and Florida, MaxSold (www.maxsold.com) clears out homes.
When an auction is planned in a location served by MaxSold, the company sends in a team to organize household items in batches, photograph them, then use social media to sell them locally in online auctions. None of the items is offered or shipped to buyers outside the immediate area.
“People think that when they put their price on items, they have control of the price. They don’t,” Gordon says. “The buying market will determine the value.” Holding out for a price can leave you holding onto the item. And clinging has its costs, especially if you need to ship an item, move it or, heaven forbid, put it into paid storage.
Gordon gives a hypothetical example: Say a family has a dining room set; they would feel awful if it sold if for less than $2,000. A would-be buyer offers $800, which the seller turns down. Then, because there’s no room for the set, it goes into storage. Three years later, at $100 a month, the seller has paid $3,600 to hang onto it, and finally sells it for $500.
Although no two households are alike, in Gordon’s experience the contents of the average North American home (in both the United States and Canada) after family members have taken what they want and paid the liquidator, yields $3,000 to $10,000. He’s heard other liquidation professionals say the average house yields about $5,900.
“Our process is not designed to replace the important work,” Gordon says, referring to the sorting and saving that family members do before anything is sold. But once they have decided what to sell, they should step aside if they’re not up to managing the sale themselves.
“Don’t work yourself into a frenzy trying to control things you can’t. What you can control is how much of your life you put into the process,” Gordon suggests.
Here are issues to keep in mind:
An estate sale. Many families hold an estate sale, where individual items are tagged, and the public is invited to shop on a particular day. This process can make for a chaotic situation, especially if a lot of people show up. Others work with a bulk buyer, who pays one price to take away everything. What you lose in profit, you gain in convenience. A liquidator such as MaxSold (and there are several around the United States) is a hybrid. It groups and auctions off the goods, then reports all sales to the clients.
Where the buyers are. More than 99 percent of household belongings sell nearby, says Gordon, whose company uses hyper-local social media advertising to promote its auctions.
Timing. How long families take to clear a home varies widely. “I’ve seen clients go through the process at light speed, burning through the sorting in a day. And others take several years, and still don’t make much progress,” Gordon says. “A good healthy time frame is probably a couple of weeks.”
Package deals. Bundling items is a tactic I wish I’d used more. For mom’s two-dozen dried flower arrangements and her 40-plus flower pots, I tagged each item, rather than selling the whole lot for $50. You’ll move more efficiently if you group similar items: all figurines, all items from the cleaning closet, all pots and pans.
Setting a “reserve.” In an auction, a reserve is the price below which the seller will not drop the price. “We don’t allow (a reserve),” Gordon says. “We ask sellers if they are done with the items. If they are, we sell.” It’s a trap to think that having a reserve ensures you will get the price you want, he says. Only set one if you’re prepared to keep the item.
Your goal. If your goal is to clear the house, understand that you may not get top dollar; you will get what the market is paying in a given time frame. “Clients need to release themselves to the competitive market,” Gordon says.
Contact Marni Jameson through www.marnijameson.com.
