Garage Sale Ideas

Some people enjoy visiting garage sales on the weekend, or whenever. If this is you, you can put together your own garage sale, visiting garage sales in order to find unique items to stock. You can even support local charities and buy from them when they have their sale.

If you enjoy garage sales so much that you want to be a garage sale organizer, you will have some experience. If you think about it, you can get paid to organize someone else's garage sale, and they pay your expenses plus a fee or commission. Or, you can have people drop stuff off which you sell, keep a portion of the sales or a commission, and they pick up the rest at a predetermined time or you get paid to donate the remaining items.

How To Start

Start by cleaning out your own closets, attic, garage, spare room, dresser drawers, under the bed, anywhere you put stuff you no longer use. Put it all together and go through it one by one. Decide on a pricing structure and be willing to haggle. Get use to running your own garage sale, holding more than one, before going into organizing other people’s garage sale,

Once you have a few clients, organize and run the sale by categorizing, labeling and pricing items with little stickies or tags with strings, negotiate with your customers, and advertising the sale before launch day. You will also be responsible for cash handling, record keeping, and the post-sale cleanup.

There is a lot of work involved, but it will be well worth the earnings you can make. With a large neighborhood sale you will need assistants of course to help you, but your income will be multiplied by the number of people using your services and the commissions you charge on items sold.

You will also need a vehicle and supplies like, price stickers, record keeping book and garage sale signs which you post in the neighborhood. Take a look into if you will need to get basic small business liability insurance to cover any problems you encounter as well - you can usually put this off until your business is established.

Expanding Your Business

Begin by contacting people in your neighborhood, then move on to contacting relevant individuals such as realtor's. Reinforce your efforts by posting business cards and fliers in as many places as possible, sending out a press release to your local newspaper, posting to websites such as Craigslist, and creating unique advertising for yourself. The more you do the more experienced you will become.

Promote to your clients that you will be saving them time and the hassle of doing it all themselves. Not a lot of people have the patience to sit for long hours in all kinds of weather waiting for customers who want to always buy for less than your marked prices. You do not need any formal education to excel in this field - just great garage sale skills, common sense, organization skills and a knack for bargaining.

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