Estate sale companies come in and price everything in an estate, then invite the local buying public in to who line up outside and wait for a turn to come in and buy the items. It is normal for those who participate in an estate sale to ask for a discount.

In an auction the auction company does not price items, but instead asks for a starting bid. The price then goes up from there, not down like in an estate sale.

Many estate sale companies will have what they call a pre-sale where they invite in their friends and offer special prices to them. Auctions do not offer pre-sales, they my however offer something known as pre-bidding. Pre-bidding is where the auctioneer sets up a live auction where the bidders can bid before the auction and have their bids entered during the auction by the auction staff.

Estate sales attract a local crowd, very very few people will drive further than 100 miles to attend an estate sales. By contrast, our bidders are from all over the world. We have sold bayonets to people from New Zealand, and England, comic books to bidders from Walla Walla, Washington to Toronto, Canada, and from Texas to Hong Kong. If you want to sell your estate to the locals, pick an estate sale, if you want to sell your estate to people from all over the world then an auction is the choice for you.

Estate sales are done in-person, that means you put the public and your property at risk for COVID-19 exposure. Auctions can be done both in-person, on-line or a combination of both on-line and in-person bidding (often called a blended auction). Coast2Coast Auctions® can provide our clients both in-person, on-line and blended auctions. Over 10 years ago we moved from conducting mostly in-person auctions to mostly on-line auctions. When COVID hit estate sale companies and in-person auctioneers started scrambling to go online, our company however was not caught flat footed, we just had to update our pick-up, and setup procedures.

Our on-line auctions have a feature called a soft close, where if someone bids in the last few minutes, then the auction will extend for a period of time and keep extending automatically each time another last minute bid comes in until no bids are received for the specified period of time.

As I mentioned earlier, one big difference between an auction and an estate sale is that in auctions you can often set a world record price. In just one of our auctions we sat 592 world record prices as verified by gpanalysis.

If you are ready for our record setting auction company to start working for you just give us a call at (314) 680-9599 for personal property or (314) 680-8598 for real property and we will get to work for you!

It is a very common thing for my phone to ring and someone on the other end to say “We just had an estate sale and wanted to know if you would be interested in selling what is left over in your auction.” Our reply to this question is normally, “If it didn’t sell in an estate sale then we would not be interested in offering it in our auction. It’s to bad that you didn’t call us before the estate sale, we could have grouped items together in our auction to get the things to all sell.” T

Think of it this way, if you sell all the gold, then it’s hard to sell the rocks all by themselves. However if you have the gold and the rocks to sell, then you can attract the gold buyers to the auction, and sell them some rocks while they are there.

In the vast majority of our auctions, there is very little left over. In some cases where there are things left over our company offers a clean out service to empty the home.

As far as I know there are no St. Louis estate sale companies that also sell real estate. Our auction company broker is also a real estate broker and a Realtor® so we can offer one stop shopping or a turn-key solution to our client’s needs.

Our company can provide buyouts to our customers. Sometimes the situation is such that there is just no time for an auction. In that case we can simply make and offer and buy the estate outright. If this is your situation, just give us a call at 314-680-8599 and we can start the process.

Hiring an auction company or an estate sale company can be daunting when trying to figure out exactly what they charge their seller. There is the commission, then there can be fees like a photography fee, advertising fees, publicity fees, and other fees. Be sure to ask the estate sale or auction company to explain all of their seller’s fees to you.

An estate sale company and an estate sale liquidator are basically the same thing, the terms are basically synonymous. When you sell an estate, you are liquidating it. The word liquidation is most commonly used with business auctions, not estates.

When you search on Google, by default the results that are returned are by geographic location. So, if you search for estate sales, Google will automatically return estate sales near you. If you are looking for estate sales elsewhere, you will need to specify a location.