How to Run a Garage Sale & Yard Sale Pricing

by Stephanie
(Ajax, ON)

I've run several garage sales in my life and they have all been very successful. The first thing that you need to do is gather all of your items that you want to sell.

The critical part about this step that a lot of people miss is that they don't know when to sell something and when to throw something away.

It's a garage sale. Not a junk give away.

People come to your sale to buy useful things. They do not want torn up clothes or electronics that don't work or broken pottery. The item has got to be usable for you to sell it. When evaluating an item, ask yourself if you had to, could you use it. If you can honestly say yes then sell it. Otherwise chunk it out with the trash. No one wants your trash and no one certainly wants to BUY your trash.

The next thing to consider is pricing. You don't want to price your items too low or you won't make any profit even if you sell a lot of stuff. But then again, you can easily price yourself out of the market.

People come to garage sales for bargains and they don't want to be gouged.

When pricing an item, you can't look at it like "I payed $100 for this," and then try to make it up. That's what I like to call counting how much money you're going to lose by selling it.

Instead you have to look at it from the other way and ask yourself, how much can I get out of this?

Finally, your garage sale may have top notch stuff but if no one hears about it, no one will come. Advertise with posters and on the internet or in a newspaper. Also, tie a balloon to your mailbox to make sure people can see that it is your house with the garage sale.

If you plan carefully, you can have a very lucrative day.

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