What you need to know before you hire an estate liquidation company isn’t always easy knowledge to get. The stresses of figuring out how to liquidate an entire estate, downsize, and clean out a home can be overwhelming. If you’re an estate executor, personal representative, widow/widower, or a senior looking to downsize, you may not even know where to start. So here’s a quick look at the 12 most frequently asked questions we get.
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Do I need to get an appraisal before I sell my own belongings or items I’ve inherited, and do you provide appraisal services?
Yes on the second part. The answer to the first takes longer to explain so check out our appraisal overview. In short: you do need an appraisal if you’re going through probate court or other legal issues. You also need an appraisal for any charitable donation for which you’re going to claim $5,000 or more. You do not need an appraisal to sell your own possessions. Always confirm with an attorney this part of what you need to know before you hire an estate liquidation company
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What’s the best way for me to sell the contents of my home and get it empty so I can sell it?
The best, most efficient way to accomplish your goal is to use a full-service estate liquidation firm like ours.
It’s a “one call solves it all solution.” We charge a labor fee and remove everything you want out of the house. We sell what can be sold (you get the money), donate what can be donated (you get the tax receipts), and haul away the trash. The money for you to make is by selling your house — not messing around trying to sell Hummel figurines for $3. Check out our comprehensive article on how to choose the right estate liquidation option.
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How long does it take you to clear a home from the time you start?
What you need to know before you hire an estate liquidation company includes a lot of good news. The average project takes us two days on-site from start to finish. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We move mountains quickly and efficiently.
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Do you provide free estimates of what your services cost and give me some idea of what can be sold versus donated? And what areas do you serve?
Yes and yes! We provide no-cost consultations every day. Call us to schedule yours now! We serve Montgomery County (Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Gaithersburg, Germantown, Olney, Potomac, Rockville, Silver Spring, Wheaton, Takoma Park, etc.), Baltimore County, Frederick County, Howard County, Prince George’s County, and the greater metro Washington D.C., Maryland, Northern Virginia) area.
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Should I use an estate sale company instead of one like yours?
No! Check out our story on 13 reasons why an estate sale may not be right for you. We used to run estate sales before the market dropped out of most furniture, antiques and so many collectibles. Most estate sales leave you with unsold furniture, many items that have to be donated, plus all the trash.
All estate sales do is delay the time it takes to put your house on the market and expose the home to damage from people stampeding through it. Even estate sales conducted online still leave you with random strangers removing things from your house with little regard for your walls, floors or anything else. In the rare cases in which we think an estate sale might be better for you, we’ll actually give you the names of our competitors! (We’re pretty sure they’re not doing the same for us.)
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Why do I have to pay a company to clear my home? I paid big money for everything in my house.
Supply and demand. There’s an overwhelming supply of most items on the market today, and not nearly enough people who want to buy them. Younger generations generally don’t care about antiques, your contemporary furniture, or most of the things you collected. One of our truisms is that “Your kids don’t want it, and your grandkids don’t even know what it is.” Check out our what’s hot and what’s not list to get an overview of what’s selling and what isn’t.
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What do I need to do to be prepared for you to handle my home cleanout project if I hire you?
We need you to do just two things. Simply identify in advance what you want to keep – and relax. That’s it. You can put colored stickers on the items you’re keeping, use painter’s tape, or anything else that works for you. We’ll take care of the rest!
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Where do you sell my possessions, and how do I know what those items are?
We use a wide variety of resources to sell your treasures – custom tailoring the best options for your particular items. That’s part of what makes us the best choice for these projects – we’re not wedded to only one way of accomplishing something.
Our resources include international, national and local auction houses, specialty dealers and stores in all kinds of fields, our own lists of buyers who have been with us for ages, and many more. Our precious metals and coins dealer wrote a check for more than $100,000 to a Takoma Park client for his silver bar and coin stash. We provide you with a written list of what we’re selling for you when we leave your home, then send you a check and an itemized list of what sold for what price when the sales process is complete.
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Could I save money by calling a charity to come get everything?
Not likely. Very few charities will go inside a home and remove big, bulky furniture anymore. They simply don’t have enough movers and drivers to do it, and they’re increasingly concerned about getting sued if an accident happens in a house. They’re not going to pack all the small objects and remove them, either — and they’re certainly not going to haul away the trash.
Orion’s Attic, however, successfully partners with a number of great charities who count on us. We did an estate liquidation and home cleanout project with Community Forklift that saved our client $1,000 in labor fees.
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Could I save money by trying to do everything myself?
One man who contacted us almost made a devastating mistake with this Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merpes painting.
Yes and no. It would take the average person six months to do what we accomplish in two days. (We can’t count the number of people who have tried it for six months or longer before giving up and calling us.) Running your own estate sale would be a nightmare. Running yard sales to make a few hundred bucks and unload 30 to 40 percent of your possessions does you little good.
And you may think friends and family are going to help you clear the rest of your house, but don’t be shocked when they fail to show up. It’s physically brutal work.
The time you’re spending attempting this may also take you away from your actual paying job. Even if you work around that, you’re still delaying getting your house sold. Don’t let a dime hold up a dollar. Our net average cost to the homeowner typically ends up landing in the half-percent of the home’s value – and some people get back more money from the sales of their stuff than they pay us in labor.
What you need to know before you hire an estate liquidation company can cost if you don’t know it. One person we met wanted to sell this painting by Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merpes in a yard sale because he hated it and thought it was worthless. His wife loved it and told him she thought it was worth big money. Good thing he came to us. It was worth more than $300,000 at the time!
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Should I just call a junk company to come get everything?
No! Throwing things away that could be used by somebody else is, to us, unconscionable. We are the green choice for your estate liquidation project. Nobody does more to keep items out of landfills than we do.
By the time you get a check for the sale of your best stuff, we often come out cheaper than straight junk haulers. It’s also very easy for you to unknowingly throw away items worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. One of our clients wanted to throw away an ugly painting he inherited. We told him that was a bad idea: the painting was worth $300,000!
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Do you buy out estates and take everything?
Almost never. We used to do that before the market for so many things collapsed (the younger generations of buyers have little interest in much of your stuff). The labor and transportation costs for us to both cover those costs AND pay a homeowner something for the contents is usually a losing proposition for companies like ours today.
Most china cabinets are impossible sell and nearly as hard to donate today.
There may be a few rare cases that involve homes full of fine jewelry or other big-dollar, high-demand collectibles in which a buyout might make sense – but there’s typically no way we can make a profit if we also have to take the items that we can’t sell plus the trash.
We do still buy certain collections of higher-value, high-demand items including old advertising pieces (original signs, point-of-purchase displays, etc.) coins, comic books, fine jewelry, sports memorabilia, vintage toys and more. See our what’s hot and what’s not list from Question 6. We can also connect you to a military antiques dealer for those items including military firearms, and to a vintage car broker for high-dollar automobiles.
And here’s a bonus knowledge nugget: Whatever you do, DO NOT put your possessions in storage.
Many of you hope that their value will come back later. Or you maybe you will have room to put them in another house later. Or that your kids will want them some day. None of those things will happen and you will spend a fortune on fees. Check out our “Don’t become a storage unit sucker” story. It will give you nightmares! If you’ve got stuff in storage now, call us to help you get it out of there! The labor charge you pay us will easily be offset by stopping the unending monthly storage fees.
Interested in a free consultation to sell your stuff and cleanout your home?
Contact us today to tell us how we can help you solve the stress of dealing with your stuff!
Find out how estate sales can go wrong from the first estate sale company visit to your home.
Study the questions you must ask estate sale companies before you hire one (if you insist on doing so).
Learn what you need to know about selling your home’s treasures in our Estate Liquidation and Downsizing Guide.
Related terms: Estate sales, estate auctions, online auctions, estate sale companies, estate disposal.
Don’t get hustled because you didn’t learn what you need to know before you hire an estate liquidation company.
