How to Have a Successful Yard Sale
The thrill of stumbling across a yard sale and finding treasures is unmatched, but as I learned this weekend, there’s kind of an art to learning how to have a successful yard sale.
I didn’t expect to be as tired and sweaty as I was afterward honestly, but I guess walking around constantly, lifting all the heavy tables and items, and generally talking to strangers nonstop for like four hours is all exhausting.
I spent a couple of weeks going through every room, closet, and even the garage. My goal was to declutter and decide what to sell
We’re moving overseas soon so we have a lot of stuff to get rid of, but since we’re still here for a few months it’s not all the big stuff like furniture just yet. Alex had said he’d be happy if we made more than $300 in this yard sale and we didn’t expect much more since it was just the smaller stuff we’re selling, but in the end we made a total of $756!
Anyway, let’s dive into allll the questions about the logistics and timing and generally how to hold a good yard sale.
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How to Advertise Your Yard Sale
We live on a busy street, so I wasn’t too worried about visibility. Still, I posted in our neighborhood Facebook group the day before as a heads-up. I mentioned the time and address, and gave some quick bullet points on what we’d have.
I mentioned in my post that I’m moving internationally (and therefore everything is definitely priced to sell!), and so I know a lot of people must’ve come after seeing that post because they made comments about my move as we chatted.
We put a yard sale sign from Home Depot at a corner either end of our street, and I also made a second post in our neighborhood FB group during the yard sale with photos of everything all set up and I think a visual helps.
I’ve also heard of some people making a Facebook Marketplace listing about their yard sale with the details!
How to Organize Your Display
I chose to separate everything by general category so as people walked around, it wasn’t just totally chaotic and they could go to the areas that interested them most. I did sections like seasonal decor, sports & outdoors, home improvement, bedding & linen, kitchen, home decor, and kids toys & clothes.
While I was decluttering, I had bins for loosely each category which also kind of helped to visualize how much of each type of item we had to set out.
I also made little signs for each category to tape to the tables so it was easy to see.
How to Display Everything (Especially When You Don’t Have a Lot of Tables)
Okay so I have so many thoughts about this that I wrote a whole separate blog post, but I’ll tell you one thing: I was not about to spend money renting tables that would take away from the money we made (ya girl needs to buy a whole house worth of furniture in a few months!).
People don’t expect curated antique store displays at yard sales. Still, having some kind of system helps so items aren’t just scattered on the ground.
How to Price Everything
This is obviously quite personal preference on what you’re comfortable selling everything at, but here’s my philosophy: if this stuff doesn’t sell, you’re probably donating it and making zero money, right? So you might as well price it as cheap as you’re willing to and think of it as a win.
For me, anything that would sell for a significant amount of money, I didn’t include in the yard sale. We’ve got to sell things like boxes of tile, bikes, bigger appliances, furniture, that I’ll sell on Facebook Marketplace instead because I’m likely to get more money for it that way and it’s less annoying having to organize a meetup for those things.
All those little things we included in the yard sale were priced generally between $1 and $5. I put a price sticker on almost every single thing to avoid too much haggling or having to field a bunch of questions from everyone and I 100% recommend that route.
I also definitely recommend having a standard price for certain kinds of items. For example, all books, hand tools and kids clothes were $1 each and that helped make it easy to just count up everyone’s total.
How to Handle Money
I don’t know if I’ve had a single bill in my purse since 2012 but apparently people roll up to yard sales prepped and ready with their cash. The day before the yard sale, I went to the bank and got $50 in dollar bills, and another $40 in fives to have on hand for change.
I think the most expensive thing at our yard sale was $20, so I didn’t expect to need anything higher than that, but I did have a couple of $10 and $20 bills from a Facebook Marketplace sale that week luckily, too.
We kept all the cash in a little (closeable) basket along with a sharpie, extra price stickers, tape, and scissors in case we needed those last minute and it worked well.
One other really handy thing is I printed out a couple of copies of my Venmo QR code and taped them to our little ‘checkout’ table to make that whole process easier and offer something other than cash.
How Many People Do You Need to Help?
This obviously depends on the size of your yard sale, but I’d say at least two. We had three people and that felt like a good number of hands – one to manage the checkout process, one to kind of float around and answer questions, and another to run and get anything we needed (including mimosas, obviously).
I had two amazing friends come and help, and Alex took the kids out for the entire time we held the yard sale so they weren’t upset (can you imagine being 4 and seeing some other kids rifling through your stuffed animals and leaving with them??)
Tips & Tricks
Now for some specific tips and tricks on how to throw a good yard sale AKA things we did that worked well and things I wish I did.
Re-arrange as You Go
As certain areas got picked over and started looking sparse, my friends would go in and re-zhuzh that area to make it look more full and I think it definitely helped!
Be Ready to Donate at the End
My rule was ‘nothing in this yard sale is coming back inside this house’. When we were wrapping up, we put everything that didn’t sell into the big black tubs we used and put them straight on our trailer to be donated.
This might be a different story for you if you’re not trying to sell up and move, but I spent so long de-cluttering that there was no way I’d re-clutter.
Keep Extra Boxes Beforehand
The one thing I didn’t do that I wish I had was hoard boxes and bags to give to people. We are almost exclusively reusable shopping bag people so don’t have a lot of plastic bags on hand, but I wish I’d kept some from drive-up deliveries, etc. to give to people who bought a lot of small things.
In the same way, a few bigger boxes would’ve been helpful to help corral people’s purchases as they were shopping. Some people would bring over a pile of things for us to set aside as they kept looking, and we had to kind of awkwardly pile them on the ground behind the folding chairs at our little cash table.
Play Some Music
This is obviously just for the vibes, but playing some music makes it a little less awkward, especially in quieter waves when people might feel a bit weird rummaging through your stuff while you’re essentially just watching them.
We just put our Google Home outside the window on the sill and played music that way, but you could use a bluetooth speaker or something, too. Obviously the caveat here is you don’t want the music to be, like, super loud or offensive. I kept it fairly low and found a playlist called something like ‘road trip hits’.
Offer Some Refreshments
We didn’t do this, but I once went to a yard sale in summer where the owners had a cooler of bottled water and sodas they were selling for $1 each and it was honestly genius! A lot of people plan to go to back-to-back yard sales on a Saturday morning or are out running errands and appreciate not having to make an extra stop for a cold drink.
Keep Kids Stuff at the End
Okay this is a dirty sneaky salesman tactic, but I deliberately put the kids’ toys and especially the stuffed animals right by the cash table so as parents were tallying up their totals their children would bully them to add in a toy and guess what? It works! Haha
I had dozens of stuffed animals in baskets and I honestly didn’t expect for them to sell well, but almost every buyer with kids threw in a stuffed animal for $1 at the end and we only ended up with maybe five or so left at the end.
Final Thoughts: Was It Worth It?
Phew, this has been a long post but these are all my thoughts on how to throw a good yard sale rolled into one.
Overall, it was a ton of work but I still think it’s worth it. We made $750+ for things we probably would’ve either donated, curb alerted or thrown away otherwise! And could you imagine how annoying it would be to try to sell little things like a set of glasses or kitchen utensils on Facebook Marketplace? I simply don’t have the stamina.
We also got to meet some cool people in our neighborhood and it’s nice to know so much of our stuff is getting a great second (or third) home. One woman bought a bunch of decor for her 19-year-old granddaughter who just moved out to her first apartment, a family of four kids all spent their chore money on little treasures from our kids’ section, and a young couple bought a whole ton of tools for the home renovation they’re starting.
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