How to sell your furniture in 4 hours
As some of you may know, I own a house in Atlanta that I’ve been trying to sell for the last twelve months. Recently I decided to turn it into a rental property as I have not received a single offer after 50+ showings.
When I departed Atlanta for Chicago last year, I left behind all of my furniture in order to ‘stage’ the house. Before putting my house up for rent, I had to get rid of all of the furniture so that it could be turned into a rental property.
Everyone reading this post should be familiar with how much of a nightmare moving an entire house full of furniture can be. Imagine having to not only prepare everything to move, but in addition I had to sell everything and because I only had limited time in Atlanta to accomplish all of this – I had 4 hours to sell everything. Here is how I was able to get rid of everything in 4 hours:
1. Consignment- I contacted an Atlanta based consignment shop that was willing to take my furniture and sell it. In general, consignment shops sell your furniture and in return you split the profits 50/50. This is a great option if you don’t like dealing with the hassle of Craigslist or in my case simply don’t have the time. The consignment shop also gave me a list of movers that would pick up my furniture and move it to the consignment shop. I arranged for the movers to start moving at 930AM on Sunday.
2. Moving Sale- I combined the old school approach of neon poster board with sharpie writing along with a quick Craigslist Moving Sale ad to bring in potential customers before the movers would be there. My thought was that anything that didn’t sell would simply be moved to the consignment shop so I had my basis covered!
The results were outstanding. I had enough people come to the moving sale that about 70% of my furniture was sold and removed from the house immediately. By the time the movers showed up, they had a lot less work and I was therefore much less dependent on the consignment shop. By not putting all of your marbles in one basket (ie: only doing consignment) I reduced my risk and I believe increased my profit as well. This approach also ensured that all of the big furniture would be removed from the house at a specific time allowing me to focus on the smaller items such as clothes, books, art, etc.
Next time you are moving cities and are debating renting a moving truck and moving all of your furniture, be sure to account for the money that you could make by selling (moving sale and/or consignment) your furniture first! Has anyone else had success with something like this?
Will, I am in the same boat with owning a place in Minneapolis and moved to Chicago a year and a half ago. After 6 months of trying to sell the place with staged furniture, I switched over to rental. I took a different approach though knowing I still wanted to sell it. I set up a month to month rental with a friend. I gave them the furniture to use and a very good deal compared to the average rental price. I may not be getting full price for the monthly rent, but this allows me to still show the condo with someone living in it, and if I get an offer my friend will leave within 30 days and will help me sell/ dispose of the furniture they don’t want.