Full service company to clean out house and pick out anything of value to sell?
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Anonymous
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My dad is acting as the POA for an elderly client who moved into a care facility. My dad is in charge of the house sale (which needs a ton of work, but due to location in Capitol Hill he has a few offers in hand). The guy has a house full of stuff- some stuff might be valuable, some is just new stuff that he bought and hoarded, some stuff could be trashed.
A traditional estate sale is out of the question because my dad wants the sale to close as quickly as possible. Can someone recommend a company that take the stuff off site, sift through what can be sold, hold the sale or auction, and discard or donate the rest? It could be a team of people going through and setting aside things to sell, then cleaning out the rest. How long would something like this take? Any recs? |
Anonymous
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Have an auction house estimator come to the house and walk the project with your Dad. My experience was that the estimator clearly let me know what was valuable.
You can hire the auction house to haul everything away and sell everything and trash what needs to be left. I'd say an hour or two to walk the house. Depending on how much is in the house anywhere for a 1/2 day do several days for the auction house to empty the house and haul to their facility for items to be sold. |
Anonymous
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I just used Ararity Services.
They came in one day (2 people) and packed up what they were taking to their warehouse and put trash into bags. Then on another day they had 4 people and a truck. They packed everything up and hauled it away. It was just a few days ago, so not sure what will be auctioned or sold. We did FaceTime to do a walk around and they were able to give me an estimate. https://www.ararityservices.com/ |
Anonymous
| You may want to compare to a price of a service that figures out what can be donated and what is trash. It's such a common story for people to think they have valuables, even rich people, but they don't. Or the few valuables they have will bring in so little money by the time it sells and the company gets a cut. |
Anonymous
| Elderly friends clearing out their houses to move to nursing homes locally have used Cull & Tend and Wayforth. Also, realtors typically have a lot of experience dealing with this sort of scenario and may be able to recommend somebody. |
Anonymous
This is the answer, OP. Definitely don’t spend too much time or money on this issue. |
Anonymous
What Ararity told me is that things women tend to collect do not have resale value, but things men tend to collect do. |
Anonymous
| OP, we were told that the value of most people's possessions (not including jewelry or known artwork), are on the order of 10-15k. When a collector relative died, the auction house that was brought in to estimate the value came up with a total value of 6k. Prior to her death, she would spend hundreds of dollars a month on various collectibles - ceramic houses, equestrian figurines, you name it. There are others like her out there who would pay similar prices for these items, but honestly, the time and work needed to find these buyers and make the sales, deem the effort not worth it, especially when the estate is getting split several ways. |
Anonymous
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Gun collections, old tools, mid century furniture, high end furniture, designer handbags, art, books, vinyl collections, minerals, WW2 memorabilia - there are many valuables in estates. What type of things does your dad have that he considers valuable? There are prestigious auction houses for more high end estates.
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Anonymous
Honest OP, even if all of this is there, you will likely be disappointed at how little it is worth for the effort. Keep in mind these places need to profit so even if there are valuables, but lands in your pocket will not be much. |
Anonymous
We have a very wealthy aunt pass and found the estate companies give you a song and dance but once you work with them it is appalling how little you get. Just hope the person enjoyed their fancy things and collections while living and didn't collect hoping it was an investment. Now if you have endless time and want to start an ebay business and go from auction house to auction house and really shop around, you might profit more, but your time is valuable too. |
Anonymous
You can definitely make a full-time job out of this, but the rate of return is so miniscule as to not be worth the time for most typical "valuable" items in an estate. And if you have to split the proceeds 2,3, or 4 ways? Definitely not worth it. We found that beyond the obviously valuable items that are easy to sell, everything else should either be put out for a yard sale/flea market (if you are up for that sort of thing), or just directly put in a dumpster. |
Anonymous
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Estate sales companies makes money by preying on people determined to believe that the stuff they love has monetary value.
It usually doesn't |
Anonymous
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Okay, I see it differently. Using an estate sale company allows you to get the house cleaned out and the stuff they sell partially pays for the getting the house cleared.
We had a borderline hoarder situation with a relative and interviewed a couple of companies to do the job. With the amount they would have given us for the stuff they could sell, the total for what we would pay them to empty the house was pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, the executor refused to entertain the thought of hiring a company because she wanted to do it all herself to save money. It ended up being a crazy mess because she didn’t know what she was doing and how to go about such a big job. The estate ended up paying much more than it would have cost to bring a professional organization in to do it. Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish. Takeaway- be careful who you allow to be executor of your estate! If someone is not handling their own life very well, they probably won’t do a good job with tying up the loose ends of someone else’s life either. |
Anonymous
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