It’s time to move. It’s always something difficult, from packing and relocating to saying goodbye to the neighborhood you’ve gotten used to for so long. What makes it harder is realizing just how much stuff you’ve got, and how much of it you really don’t need – but it’s not junk! So you should take it with you, right? But you already know there’s nowhere to put it in the new place….
These thoughts can rattle around in your head like a box of silverware that hasn’t been properly packed together. Instead of fretting about it, you can hold a Moving Sale to get rid of some of your unwanted, unneeded, or unmoveable items so you can start in a new place with a more manageable inventory of items. It can even help pay back some costs of hiring professional movers to help you get your new home ready. Here’s a quick walkthrough of what goes into a successful moving sale.
1.  Plan Your Inventory
For the next few days of your moving/yard/garage sale, you’ll become the manager of a very low-end store on your own property. So first, you need to figure out what you’ll be selling. Decide, once and for all, what you want to take with you and keep it inside. Everything else should be ready for sale. If it needs to be packed up, hung up, or just dragged out, get it ready.
2.  Plan To Work
If you’ve ever seen a yard sale you must think it’s pretty easy. You just sit in the shade and wait for people to roll by to inspect your goods. It’s not that simple. You’ll need to put prices on everything, every single item, and be willing to negotiate with keen buyers who are looking to get a deal for themselves first and foremost. You’ll be out there all day, for multiple days, just to watch over everything so it doesn’t suddenly turn into a moving-out donation drive instead.
3.  Plan For Weather
Look ahead to see what the weather is going to be like. If you’re lucky, it’ll be sunny and mild so people will be outdoors, walking around as normal who might just happen to cross your street and see what’s going on. You don’t want to have clothes hanging or boxes out in the rain, or in a dangerous heat wave. If you have a garage, you can keep everything in there and let the more weather-durable goods rest outside during the day.
4.  Plan Your Advertisements
A business can’t do business without letting people know that it’s in business. And what you’re running, however temporarily, is a very small business. Send out messages, get friends involved, even make flyers to post in approved public areas if you can. That’ll help get rid of all the extra printer paper you weren’t planning on packing anyway. Just posting a sign in your yard isn’t enough. You want people informed of what you’re doing from one end of your town to the other for maximum potential traffic.
5.  Plan Your Prices
You might be tempted to get a full refund for all the things you bought and never used or forgot about, but that’s just not realistic. Even if you only used that massage gun or blender once, people will assume that it’s as second-hand as anything on eBay is. So you may as well check what people are doing on eBay. Price your goods according to second-hand online stores like eBay. If anyone is curious about how much they should pay, that’s likely what they’ll check before haggling.
6.  Sell Online, Too
There’s no reason not to sell online. In fact, for specialty goods, it’s probably a better idea. Appliances and electronics have a huge market online. Consider the state of your neighborhood. Will the old man down the street really be interested in a slightly refurbished Xbox? The only issue with selling online is time. An item could stay listed for weeks, and by then you will have already moved, so put them up at the moving sale too for a lower price. If it sells, it sells, and you can always deactivate the listing early.
7.  Get Some Help
Moving is already a lot of work, and doing a moving sale is like moving without actually leaving your house. You’ll be arranging and placing all your old items in a new place – the yard, and that takes work. Maybe too much for one or two people to handle. Get the family involved. And your friends. Offer them whatever you can for help, a warm meal, or first pick of the merchandise.
8.  Get Ready Early
You might think that outdoor, home-based moving sales are things of the past, but if you’ve seen one recently then you will figure out why that’s not true. If you advertise properly, people will come. Some make a dedicated effort to go to as many yard sales as they can to hunt for bargains on things. They know you aren’t just pushing your junk out the door for them to collect. The things you sell had value to you once, so they must still have some kind of value to them. Expect some early shoppers to show up as soon as your first day.
9.  Plan For Money
How are people going to be paying for everything? You’re not a real store, you don’t have a credit-card swiper…..But you could. Personal card swipers that integrate with apps on your phone are common place nowadays. They link right up to online payment processors like PayPal, too. They’re great for small businesses, and even though yours is the smallest a business can be, it doesn’t hurt to go digital with money. Not everyone will carry cash, and do you have enough change for everything you listed? Who knows. Maybe someday you’ll need that swiper again. Or, in your next moving sale, you can get a decent price for it.
10.  Everything Must Go
The goal here is to leave nothing behind, not even regrets. At the end of the sale, you might still have stuff left, probably more than you want, but you’ll have made something out of it. As for the rest? If you can’t sell it, and it’s not trash, donate it to a local charity so it can go to people who need it but can’t afford it. You can move out knowing you made your neighborhood a little better than when you left.