Estate Sale Haul of the weekend - Board Games and oher randoms.

I only stopped at one sale this weekend, and even though I usually like to shop on Sundays when deals are better, I only had time on Saturday to shop, and only time to stop at one sale.  Even though I was only out an hour, I found some fantastic stuff. Today, I'll show off the games that I was able to find.

First up - A full Monopoly Deluxe Edition set.  The box is a little beat up, but all the pieces are there!  I was recently quite surprised at the resale value of board games, it's not something I ever thought to look at before.  It currently sells for about $15, bought it for $2!

Next was an even cooler find, a semi-rare 1965 30th Anniversary Monopoly Set, found at the same sale.   Also $2, but can't find much history on sales price.  Once I clean up the box I'll have to list and roll the dice.

Also at $2, A Trivial Pursuit Master Game Genus Edition.  A little more common, and only resells for about $15.

This one is slightly game related, it's a 1978 1st Edition Scrabble Dictionary. $1 to buy, and it has no current listings. 

Trying it out at $15 to see of anyone has interest. 

Two random CD pickups, but both new in package.  $1 apiece.  Yanni sells for $8, and The Disney "It's a Small World" CD sell for $18 new.

Cinderella VHS new - paid $1, sells for $10.  (which is actually it's price tag price!)

VHS Tapes!  15 new tapes in one box, paid $1. Even with a best up outside wrapper, I'll be selling for $24.

I also grabbed a couple records for $1 to keep, all in all a pretty good trip for one estate sale.

Goodwill Outlet - Tips for Treasure Hunting

I just had my first experience with a Goodwill Outlet, and it's like no other store I've shopped at.

I've passed this sign many times before, but have never stopped in.  I had a little free time so I thought I'd go inside, with no knowledge of how the store worked.

Basically, the entire place is a giant warehouse, and almost everything is sold by the pound.

Workers were constantly bringing out pallets of new items, and people were lined up to dig through the contents.

Almost everything that was being brought out was clothes.  I asked a worker if there were any books or movies, and he said they bring out whatever the managers say, and today was all clothes.

 Even with that in mind, I still dug for 15 minutes and found some treasures.

First up, a Spongebob Squarepants Operation Game.  I've never really thought about hunting for board games much, besides older vintage ones.  It turns out that there's a decent sized market for older games, and there's currently one of these listed on Amazon for $50.  This one is a little ragged and taped shut, so we'll have to see if all of the pieces are there.

The only other finds were two unopened Disney VHS tapes, Peter Pan and The Jungle Book.  

You want to be careful when buying things that look new, but for these, the top label stickers are still secured.  The still sell new for around $10-$15.
 2 pounds of merchandise set me back $3.  No bad for a potential $60-$80 profit!  I was only in the store for 15 minutes, and from doing a little online research, it seems that the longer you stay in, the more product there is to hunt through.  Looking forward to checking it out again.

Weekend Haul Update - NOTHING!

I was out of town this weekend, and was only able to hit up one Garage Sale in Milwaukee.  It was probably the smallest Garage Sale I've ever shown up to, but it was a spot on the side of the road, so not too much time wasted!  Tonight is shipping night, two of my Amazon books sold, as well as one Super 8 film that I had listed on Etsy.  At least there was some activity over the weekend, just no new stock.

Goodwill, old books, and Amazon FBA

I'd never heard if Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) until this week, and it seems like an interesting way to diversify my selling. You're still selling through Amazon, but the neat part about it is you actually send your items to Amazon before they sell, and they store and ship them to the buyers for you. 

Remember these books from the garage sale? I used the Amazon Seller App to scan the barcodes and list them.  It took about 15 minutes in total to post 13 books.  These are now just listed on Amazon as regular listings.  If someone buys them, I print shipping labels and mail them like I would on an eBay sale.  The next step will be converting them to Amazon FBA orders.  I print out stickers for each one, and then ship one giant box to Amazon.  They then add them to their regular inventory, and handle the rest of the transaction.  The other great thing about using this method is that since the items are now in Amazon's warehouse, they can qualify for Prime shipping rates, and can also count towards a regular buyer's quota to get free shipping.  Are some of these items as fancy as other antiques and collectables I may find?  Not necessarily, but a lot of people have been using this program to streamline buying and selling cheaper things. 

I had set these starter books out at the garage sale to get rid of them for space reasons, at $1 a piece.  With the garage sale traffic, I was able to sell 2 whole books; not too great for the point of getting rid of them. 

In the time of posting the books last night to writing this, one of them has already sold for $29, not a bad start for 15 minutes of book scanning!  I think I'll test the waters with this by getting rid of things I don't need or want, like old books, CDs, and movies. 

With this new stuff in my brain, I was driving by a Goodwill with a little free time and stopped in.  Personally, I feel like Goodwill isn't the best place to find great deals, and they have a pretty streamlined process for taking expensive donations and marking them at what they're worth, or auctioning them on their own.  CDs were half price when I walked in, so I thought I'd test the new Amazon Selling app in the store and see if I could find anything quick that was worth money. 

First thing i found was an unopened audiobook of Mario Puzo's "The Family."  With a quick scan of the barcode I could see that a new copy sells for $25, and the cheapest used copy sells for $9.  I decided it was worth the $1 to buy!

The next odd thing I found in the CD section were three Pioneer CD Magazine Cartridges, mainly for a car where you could load 6 CDs inside, and then put the whole cartridge inside, having six CDs ready instead of one.  (yes kids, there were a lot of odd workarounds before music was on phones)
These were $1 each, and the cheapest they're selling on Amazon is $15.  It's the kind of thing that will never be produced again, and if you have a car that uses them (they were stock in BMW for a couple years) then you'll want a spare if they break.  Are any of these items going to be fast sellers?  Probably not, but the fact that I can buy them, post them, and get them out of my house is pretty cool.

From looking around online, the key to FBA success is to have a lot of merchandise posted. Some people will try to buy a bulk purchase of books or DVDs at a garage sale, and then scan them all and ship them, hoping to find a couple gems in the batch. Other use it to find clearance items in bulk at regular stores like Target and Walmart. Buying and selling new stuff doesn't appeal to me, but if this is successful, grabbing a large pile of books and sending them off may be worth trying, and letting the revenue trickle on as they're sold. 

Yard Sale dissapointments - When a Garage Sale is a bust.

July 4th weekend isn't known for great sales, and this one was no exception. I went to EstateSales.net (check it out if you haven't before) and found there were ZERO estate sales in the Metro Area. Not a single one!  I had two hours free on Sunday, and decided to head to craigslist for some end of day Garage Sale deals. Instead I found three sales that had already packed up before their end times. Each house I drove to was another sad waste of time. I finally made it to one sale that was open, but the items of interest were pretty sparse. It wa mostly car parts, but I did find two records that were decent.

At 50 cents apiece, you can't go wrong with a Disney Christmas record and "The Jazz Singer." 

The Disney record was in great shape, and was stored nicely, and looked like it hadn't even been played.

When I played it at home, I found out why: The songs are performed by Larry Groce, and doesn't contain a single Disney reference in the actual music. Nothing against Mr. Groce, but my daughter was bored 2 songs in. 

I'm surprised it's sold for anything, but when searching eBay's sold listings, it's sold between $2 and $10. I thought I was buying it to add to the Christmas collection, but it seems like I'll be posting it instead. 

I grabbed "The Jazz Singer" for the same reason as the Chrismtas album, I figured I'd add it to my own small record collection. As it turns out, this one is also worth some money, and in great shape. Also stored properly, and in Near Mint condition. 

I've never really sold records much before, mainly because I don't know much about them. 

It looks like this one sells for about $10-$25, which surprised me. I figured a lot of top selling albums wouldn't be worth much, and that the resale market would be flooded. It turns out that just like comics, condition is everything. 

Even though I spent 45 minutes driving between Yard Sales that didn't exist, I did walk away with 2 records. In total, I spent $1, with a potential profit of $12-$35. Still not the best day out shopping, but it could be worse. 

Bag Sale Basics - An Estate Sale Secret Weapon

I didn't think I'd be shopping any sales the same weekend that I was hosting a garage sale, but when you're driving him and pass an estate sale a mile from your house, it's pretty tough not to stop in.

We walked in at 3:45 on a Sunday, the sale had 15 minutes left. When I first entered, I could smell my two worst enemies at an estate sale, cars and perfume. This woman was an Avon seller, and there were over 3,000 (that is not an exaggeration) bottles of Avon perfume bottles. The entire basement was just shelves if the stuff. Anyway, when we walked in, the people at the front door let us know that everything was 50% off (a standard Sunday estate sale practice), but this sale also had a "Bag Sale" going on.

This means they were giving out small paper bags (a little smaller than a grocery store bag) and anything you could fit inside the bag would be ten dollars. If never been to a sale like this, and the house still seemed pretty full. With a 15 minute shopping spree, this misbehave we bought. 

Yahtzee - $5 - marked down to $2.50. 

It didn't fit in the paper bag for the ba sale, but had a full set of Kismet (a game that's pretty much he same as Yahtzee) and 5 score pads. The old pads themselves still sell for $2-$3 each; I even bought one myself, along with the exact same dice cup, a month ago for $5. $2.50 was too good to pass up. Now on to the bag contents:

Four Avon Christmas Aprons- $3 each - My wife bought these so we can look ridiculous during the holidays. 

1962-63 Bowling Trophy - $3. 

Letter Opener - $5

Charlie Brown Thanksgivng (the "not as good" one) unopened VHS - $1

The Real Ghostbusters unopened VHS $1 (sells on eBay for $10-$20, us 30-year-olds love that Ghostbusters cartoon!)

Tons of Zippos and Measuring Tapes. $80. 

If I hadn't seen these, I probably wouldn't have even started a bag for the sale, and would have been happy with the Yahtzee find. When I saw all of these Zippos, the deal was too random to pass up. There were 67 Zippos and 13 Measuring Tapes in a shoebox.

They all have branding on them, so  sure they were used for giveaways a long time ago. Unused Zippos, even with awkward branding, should sell for at least the Estate Sale asking price of $1 apiece. I'll probably put them for sale in groups of ten to start and see what happens. I don't know about the measuring tapes, but as long as I sell a single batch of Zippos for $10 I made my money back for the day. 

I have no idea if this will pan out, but the Zippos were worth a shot. In total I got $107 worth of estate sale items for $12.50, none of the items are going to turn a super large profit, but for a quick stop on the way home, it was a nice surprise.  

The Buyer Becomes a Seller: Hosting a Garage Sale

This past weekend I became a Garage Sale host, the first time I've done that in my adult life. We took a chance with our neighborhood Garage Sale weekend.

We had a lot of your standard garage sale fare...

All kinds of furniture...

Some mid century chairs that my next door neighbor brought over when he saw us setting up...

Baby stuff...

Cheap books with a witty sign...

Old work shirts that an Apple super fan may find "collectable"(a steal at $1 apiece!)

Mostly a pretty normal sale, except for the...

CED Video records!

Super 8 Films and other old stuff!

It was interesting to sell random collects led at a standard garage sale. They definitely saved us when it came to profit.

Our biggest letdown of the community sale was our proximity to other sales. With over 100 sales in our neighborhood, we were in an odd no sale zone, with no other sales happening 2 blocks in either direction. Since we're two blocks west of the Mississippi River, people had no great incentive to hit up a lot more sales to walk two more blocks to only see us. We still had a steady flow of regular garage sale customers, but it was rare to have more than one shopper at a time. 

It's hard to know how much the signs we posted on busier streets helped, but I do know the Craigslist ad I posted was a good draw. 

I sold about 300 comics to the first customer, a guy who showed up 15 minutes before we opened. I'd posted on Craigslist about the various antiques and collectables, including the 25¢ comics. These were all from the last time I got in to buying new comics every week, from 2006-2009. All worthless, but this guy found a deal for $40, and I got rid of 3 short boxes worth of shelf storage. He also bought a couple of the CED video discs. 

The next bulk item to go were the CEDs. CEDs are a red headed stepchild of home media. They look like laserdiscs, but are actually video records, on vinyl, and are somewhat of a rarity, but a worthless one. (I'll write a more in depth post on them later)

Before setting them out, I quickly shuffled through them and pulled out some of my favorites that I didn't want to sell. 

I sold a couple of them singly to random people. One woman saw "Cat Billou" in the pile and bought it to hang because it was her favorite movie. Someone else bought "Jaws" (one that I missed!), but mostly they drew some odd looks and good small talk. 

Around noon, someone beelined right for them, and started quizzing me to see if I knew about them. I was already selling them for 50¢ apiece, and he made an offer for all of them. In the end I sold roughly 200 movies for $50, and didn't have to carry them any more! A CED weighs 2.5 pounds for one movie, and it took almost as long to carry those up from the basement than it did the rest of the garage sale stuff!

I received the whole collection and player from a friend for free, so it was actually a relief to get rid of titles that I'd never watch.

About ten minutes after we unloaded the CEDs, the guy who came on the morning that bought all the comics was back. One of the CEDs that he bought was a part 2 of 2, and he came back looking for part one. I had to give him the bad news that they all left, and he was bummed, but understood. The good that came out of this is decided to buy more stuff, a Star Wars Super 8 digest (a smaller part of the full film) and the three Batman and Robin 1949 serial parts that I had left. I let him have those 4 films for $35, even though I marked them at $15 apiece. I'd bought 11 of the Batman Reels for $35, the eBay poster had misspelled the listing. Thankfully I have a saved search in eBay for "Super 8 Flim," so there's a good chance I'm the only person that saw that listing. I'd sold all the other separately on eBay for $20-$30 each, so letting the final ones go for $35 was still profit. 

All in all we had a great time. If not for some of the odder collectible stuff, we'd probably consider the sale a bust. We sold $198 worth of stuff, and $150 of it was from my random stuff. Our family members that brought items got rid of some big furniture which was good for them, and we all had a great time hanging out all day.

For future sales, I learned about local Facebook groups for my area, and people post ther sales there in the morning. I learned about these pages too late, so I had to wait to be added by the admin of the pages before I was able to post. If you're going to do your own sale, try to seek these pages out before the morning of the sale!