Selling Estate Jewelry Can Be Tricky.
It happens all the time, someone calls us because they have lost a parent or Mom has gone into assisted care, or a nursing home and they were left with a large amount of jewelry that they needed to deal with, along with collectibles, furniture, sometimes coin collections, guns, tools, and household items.
Many times before we get the call the family goes and sells the estate jewelry to a local pawn shop or estate jewelry buyer. On their way home they stop by the coin shop and sell dad’s coin collection, or maybe a box or two of old comic books to the local comic shop. Now they want us to get the home empty for them so they can put it on the market.
There are several problems with this:
1. To have a successful auction, you need something to attract buyers to look at the auction.
Certain things will attract way more people to your auction than other things. Things like estate jewelry, coins, guns, tools, gold, and silver. If you remove all of the items that people are looking for, searching for online, you decrease the number of people who will find your auction online by searching, and less people finding the auction means fewer bidders, and fewer bidders means less, competition, and less competition means less money.
2. Certain bidders by particular things.
Ask any auctioneer who has been in business any length of time and they will tell you that they have certain people who buy specific types of assets. It is supper common for some furniture buyers to only buy furniture. They have a store, or they have a new home and need furniture. But ask that same auctioneer what someone buys who buys gold and they will tell you something like this, “Jewelry, gold, silver, sterling, guns, furniture, junk, and anything else that they think is not selling for much that day.”
3. The people who buy those particular things search on certain words way more often then other words.
This is not just my opinion, it is a fact. If you want to have Google give you some ideas what people search for try typing in something in Google search and then look at what Google suggests for you to type next. In this case I typed in “sell estate” and the first thing Google thinks I might type next is “jewelry”, and the second thing Google thinks I might want to type next is “jewelry near me”. This is because Google has lots and lots of experience with search and it can usually guess what people are going to type next based on past search history. Google isn’t just making it up as it goes along. What this means to you is that if you sell your estate jewelry somewhere other than at your estate, auction you are not going to get those people who are looking for the thing that Google thinks they are most likely looking for when they search for someone selling an estate. They will never see your auction or estate sale. Guess what people searching for estate sale jewelry want to buy? You guessed it, estate jewelry. It’s not just what people buy that matters, it’s what they bid on.
4. A bidder that comes to an auction to by estate jewelry will bid on a lot of other items.
They may or may not be the high bidder on that item, but they always will increase the price that it sells for. I have seen bidders that came for jewelry leave with a truck full of furniture (and some jewelry) more time than I can count. We are talking full truck, packed and stacked, heck I can tell you by name which bidders it is going to be that do this before the fist item even sells!
5. It’s not just about what you sell, it’s about what you can’t sell.
Think of it as a mine, if you take all of the gold and silver away you might have a lot of rocks left over to deal with. If you sell your estate jewelry to the local pawn store, they are not going to come over and help you get your real estate empty so you can sell it.
6. It’s not easy to give things away.
Many people are under the mistaken belief that they can just call up Goodwill and they will just come over in a truck and haul off the left overs to their store for you. It doesn’t work that way. Most thrift stores don’t pick up, Some Goodwill locations will pick up SOME furniture. The keyword there is some. You might be shocked what types of furniture and other things that that they will not pick up. But you just never know what will sell at an auction. Also, notice that they don’t pick up small stuff. Most estates have lots and lots of small stuff, stuff in the basement, stuff in the closets, stuff in the garage, stuff everywhere! If you have an auction with estate jewelry, gold, silver, coins, guns, tools and other desirable things in it, you will get lots of participation and lots of those things that Goodwill and others will not pick up will go bye bye with those nice people who bid on the good stuff.
7. If you don’t have good stuff like estate jewelry to sell, you get to pay someone to take of the not so good stuff.
You might be shocked how much it costs to have things hauled off and thrown away. These costs can often be much more than what the estate jewelry sold for to the jewelry store or pawn shop. Most people have no clue how expensive it is to have someone haul off things from a home and just how much space it takes. They call a service junk hauler and find out that what they thought was going to take 1 truck to haul off is going to take 5 or 6 big trucks to haul away. If you leave your good things like estate jewelry with the estate you can often avoid most of this cost.
8. It costs a lot of money to hold on to a house while you try to empty it.
Taxes, mortgage payments, maintenance, and vandalism can all eat away at how much you get from an estate. Every day you hold on to an estate costs you money.