An estate sale is a house being emptied, usually by a company that priced the contents. The tag on a lamp or a box of tools is their ask. It might be careful. It might be a glance on the way through the dining room. You cannot tell from the handwriting. You can tell by looking at the object and at what the same object is listed for elsewhere.
Read the door before you read the tag
Many estate-sale companies discount as the sale goes on, and they post the schedule where you walk in. That sign is the policy. A blog cannot tell you that Sunday is half off, because the next sale may not work that way. If the sign says the price holds all weekend, believe the sign.
A family story about who owned the piece is context. It is not a price. Provenance that would move money is the kind you can show: a maker, a document, a set that is still complete. “It was Grandma’s” is not that.
What to look at
The tag names a guess. The object has the facts.
- Who made it. A mark on the bottom, a label in a seam, a model stamped in the metal. Photograph that, not only the pretty side.
- Whether the set is complete. Lids, cords, shades, boxes, the second glove. A pair priced as a pair, with one missing, is a different thing.
- Condition you can see. Chips, repairs, water marks, a reclined mechanism that sticks. Turn it over. The underside is where a lot of estate pricing never looked.
- Whether it is the thing the tag says. Titles get copied from memory. If the mark says otherwise, the mark wins.
Art, jewelry and tools are the categories where a wrong name is expensive in either direction. If you do not know the mark, the honest range is wide, and a wide range is a reason to pay the low end or leave it.
Asking prices around the same object
Worth’s live check looks at what retailers and marketplaces are asking, new and used. A retailer price tells you the replacement. A marketplace price, eBay or Facebook Marketplace or a resale app, tells you what sellers hope. Neither is a receipt from the last sale. Use them to see whether the estate tag is lonely or crowded.
If every current ask sits well under the tag, the company priced the story. If the tag sits with the asks, you are buying at the market, and the only edge is that you can inspect it in the room.
Do not invent a bargain
Early in a sale the interesting things go to the people who knew what they were looking at. That is not a statistic. It is the shape of a sale where more than one person can read a mark. Showing up later can mean the markdown on the sign, and also the picked-over rooms. Both can be true. Decide from the object in front of you.
Checking yours
Photograph the mark and the whole piece. The Worth app returns a range and the live asks it could find, new and used, not only on eBay and Amazon. Tell it what is missing and the range moves. The same habit works on a thrift rack, which is what to check before you flip, and on a driveway, which is pricing a garage sale find.