Successful Garage Sale Tips and Advice

As the weather has become beautiful again in Minnesota, many people’s thoughts turn to spring cleaning and garage sales.

Here are some garage sale tips to having a successful garage sale:

• Check with your association management. While some associations allow garage sales, others do not. Because putting on a garage sale requires a significant amount of time and effort, it’s wise to find out if your association allows them in the first place.
• Take multiple forms of payment. With the advent of technologies that take credit cards such as Square and PayPal Here, there’s no reason that you can’t get paid in whatever way works best for the buyer. (By the way, since most of your shoppers probably will be using cash, be sure to have change available.)
• Have shopping bags and boxes on hand. You don’t want potential buyers to be limited in their purchases by what they can carry in their hands alone. Just like a store, if you have bags and boxes available, you might be ringing up more sales.
• Coordinate with your neighbors. The same way that a shopping mall makes it convenient to visit multiple stores in one trip, you and your neighbors could get more shoppers if you schedule your garage sales during the same timeframe.
• Advertise. Many buyers map out their day of garage sailing by looking online for locations and general categories of what will be at each sale. Some suggested places to advertise include: Nextdoor, Yard Sale Treasure Map, craigslist, and Facebook Buy and Sell groups.
• Post many signs. Speaking of advertising, be sure to post turn-by-turn signs to direct shoppers to your door. There’s no need for shoppers to miss your sale because not enough signs were posted.
• Don’t overprice. While you may be attached to your items, they still are secondhand products to a new owner.

Use these garage sale tips at your garage sale. Remember that your goal is to clear out excess clutter – near the end of the sale it’s wise to offer items at a discount.

(Photo credit: San Mateo County Libraries via Flickr cc)