How to Organize a Garage Sale Like a Boss

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You’ve been feverishly decluttering your house and now the weather is nice enough that you’re thinking about hosting a garage sale before you bring everything to the thrift store.

Before you get your price stickers and signs ready, you should do a little preparing so you can organize a garage sale that will make you as much money as possible.

How to Organize a Garage Sale

There are several steps that go into hosting a successful yard sale.

First, you have to schedule a date for your sale. This may not be a problem right now but usually there’s a lot going on where I live so I wanted to pick a day with as little happening as possible.

It would suck to plan this whole thing to find out it conflicts with a major event. I used the “Events” tab on Facebook, you can input a date and it’ll show you upcoming events.

Disclaimer: If your only available day conflicts with a big event, don’t worry too much. Serious garage sale shoppers stop at nothing to get their fix.

The other important detail is day and time. We decided to hold ours on a Saturday from 8am-5pm. We held our sale in a fenced-in backyard so we could set up the night before and minimize work in the morning.

I read that serious buyers would show up early and without fail, at 7am they were there. We were mostly set up so we just let them in.

The morning was the busiest. We were steady until 1:00 then really quiet for 45 minutes. We had a late rush at 1:45 then it was steady again for another hour and a half. It started sprinkling at 4 so we packed everything up a little early.

I’m glad we decided to start at 8, I couldn’t imagine people showing up at 5 or 6am. There is not enough coffee in the world for me to be ok with that. If I could do it over I probably would’ve ended at 1. The last rush of people was nice but not worth the sitting around.

How to Advertise Your Garage Sale

The key to a successful sale is good advertising. You can have the best stuff but if no one knows or there’s no incentive to come then you wont sell them. There were three things we did to make sure as many people got to our house as possible.

1. Have Multiple Sellers

We were inspired by another sale that had six or seven different people selling in one place. Having a “multi-family” sale not only means more items but also a larger variety, that gives more people incentive to come, even people who might not be into yard sale-ing.

People with different interests accumulate different stuff and if you don’t jive with one seller’s items you might like what another seller has to offer.

If it is a lot of the same stuff, consider theming your sale to set it apart. JD Roth from Get Rich Slowly looked at what he had most of and listed his sale as a “Geek Garage Sale.” You might think you’ll drive people away by niching down but you actually make your sale more attractive to non garage salers.

Multiple sellers also means more exposure. The more people you have selling, the more people you have sharing the event with their friends.

2. Coordinate With Another Garage Sale

Sales that happen on the same day aren’t competition, they’re advertising! I discovered this one by accident and it by far brought us the most traffic. A friend at my work had planned a sale for the same day as ours. She was nearby so I suggested we print out fliers for each other’s sales and hand them out to people as they left.

The flier was a simple half-sheet of paper with the sale address, times, and highlights of what we were selling. This is a great option for people who want to host a multi-family sale but don’t have space. And I’m sure if none of your friends want to host you could easily find nearby sales on Craigslist and email the seller to set something up.

3. Post Your Garage Sale Online

Craigslist is where all the serious buyers and sellers go. I posted on Monday and then another with a rephrased title on Thursday. Then I posted in Facebook Marketplace and in relevant local Facebook groups.

I also Googled “garage sale” and posted to every site that popped up on the first page. Most of the garage sale listing sites are in the same family of websites which made filling out the details easy (thanks auto-fill!).

How to Prepare Your Yard Sale

Go through the boxes of stuff you haven’t seen in years before you put them out for sale. My husband was going through one I’d put out and found a copy of my social security card, I had not intended to sell my identity.

And if you can’t put everything out the night before like we did, you should do as much as possible to limit your stress on the morning of and have time for more coffee.

1. Garage Sale Pricing

We used a combination of methods for pricing. For clothes and items we had a lot of I made a sign with individual and bulk prices, I bought price stickers and put them on other items. A lot of stuff we left blank. When people asked how much we either yelled out a price or asked “How much you offering?”

If we’d had a smaller sale I wouldn’t have priced anything. When people name their own price they’re more likely to buy the item. The nice thing about putting prices on some stuff was that I didn’t have to talk as much. Introverts will appreciate pricing items individually.

I found pricing suggestions on Angie’s List and found that people will haggle you down whether the price is fair or not, so best practice is to price high.

2. Garage Sale Signs

I bought signs to stick in the ground and neon cardstock to post on poles, fences, etc. I thought four signs would be enough but my paranoid husband thought we could put up every sign we had. He was right.

It was the signs on neon poster board that attracted the most attention. People saw the white signs in the ground but they got to us by the bright ones. Our signs just said “Yard Sale” with the address at the bottom and an arrow in the middle pointing the way to treasure land.

If you can, have someone check your signs midway through the sale. One of ours fell and was pointing AWAY from our sale.

What to do The Day of Your Garage Sale

First, give yourself more time to post the signs than you think you’ll need. We had a debate on which illegal places would be least illegal to post our signs. Every city has their rules so check yours to be sure.

I posted a Facebook Live video on my profile giving a tour of the sale. I called attention to some of the more enticing items and introduced all our sellers.

Here are some essentials that kept our ship sale-ing (lololol):

• Chill music– It’s too early in the morning for all that hip hop, play something inviting that will keep the people browsing and your neighbors from yelling at you.
• Fanny pack– Keep your money close and your fanny pack closer.
• Free section– There are some things that no one will buy at your yard sale, doesn’t mean you can’t put them out, but don’t waste your time pricing them.

With a few hours left in the sale, I started posting big ticket items that didn’t sell to Facebook Marketplace. By doing that I was able to secure a home for almost everything I posted.

I posted midday thinking people would come while we were still selling but nobody could make it until the next day so you could probably wait until your sale is over to post.

Warning: responding to all those Facebook messages was almost more tiring than the actual sale.

What to do After a Yard Sale

Take down the signs so people don’t continue to show up at your house, delete your Craigslist and other ads so people don’t roll by your house trying to get free stuff, and count your money!

We took name brand clothes that didn’t sell to Plato’s Closet and made $15 more. And we continued to post big-ticket items to Facebook Marketplace.

Bring leftovers to a thrift store or call one to see if you can have your stuff picked up. We made around $400 not including the furniture we sold on Marketplace the next day.

For the amount of work we put (and didn’t put) into it, I’m glad we did it. Purging is so cathartic and to get some spending money in exchange is just a bonus.

Tell me: What do you think about garage sales? Do you have any interesting garage sale stories or tips to share?