Location Pt. 2

This post continues directly from my previous post.

It may take you a couple times to find some good neighborhoods.  There are several options to make your chances of finding good neighborhoods better.  The first is to simply ask someone you know who does go garage saling in your area.  Similarly, if there’s a forum/community website for your area, you could ask people there for advice.  When I was in Omaha for a wedding in July, I asked r/Omaha for advice on garage saling neighborhoods in the city.  Another option, if you have any friends who garage sale, is to ask to go with them.  Finally, you can look on Craiglist to try to find neighborhoods with a high density of sales.  Keep in mind that most sales aren’t listed on Craigslist so with this method you’re getting an incomplete picture.  If you do use Craigslist, be sure not to just go point-to-point from a bunch of addresses you wrote down as I discussed above.

One thing Craigslist is good for is looking for neighborhood sales.  I strongly urge you to not go out of your way for neighborhood sales; I have never been to a neighborhood sale that had as many participants as it claimed in advertisements.  The typical neighborhood sale has between one-sixth and one-fourth as many participating families as it claims; if you see an ad for a neighborhood sale consisting of items from twenty families, expect maybe five to actually have stuff out for sale.  I actually went to a neighborhood sale one time that had exactly zero participants.  Who organized it?   Also, during neighborhood sales, many participants put out only one or two pieces of overpriced furniture or other undesirables yet are still considered participants for advertising purposes.  Therefore, you should never go out of your way for neighborhood sales.  If they’re on your route, go ahead and stop.  One good item makes it worth it.  If you have to drive more than a couple minutes out of your way, don’t bother.  It’s not worth it.

In the near future I’ll be posting about reading people’s signage (this may seem unnecessary, but it’s surprisingly how poorly marked most sales are) and finding people willing to go saling with you.  Then, I will move on to bargaining.

Location Pt. 1

There are two ways to choose where you are going to garage sale.  The first way is to write down a bunch of addresses from Craigslist and use your GPS to drive to each of the addresses you wrote down.  This is the wrong way — you end up missing a majority of the sales because most sales aren’t listed on Craigslist and your GPS takes you the most efficient route, not the route that has the most sales.  The other way is to choose some neighborhoods ahead of time and drive around those.  While this may seem like you’re blindly driving around looking for sales, it really is the more efficient method if you know the type of neighborhoods to choose.

Demographics is key when choosing an area for garage saling.  Many people assume that garage salers typically go to upper-class neighborhoods to find the exceptional bargains.  In reality, garage saling in these neighborhoods invariably proves disappointing: sales are relatively infrequent and those sales that do exist contain too many “undesirable” items, such as clothing and furniture. (Clothing and furniture are fine if you’re looking for clothing and furniture; however, sales dominated by clothing and furniture tend to have little of anything that I consider “good” garage sale items.  More on this another time.)

The enlightened garage saler goes to solidly middle class neighborhoods.  Not upper middle class, not lower middle class, but solid middle class.  In my experience, neighborhoods composed of older but well-kept houses are best.  Note well-kept; that’s key.  Well-kept older homes implies two important things: (1) the owners have money to buy nice things but (2) they don't have too much money so that they can just give the stuff away.

Once you’ve decided upon some neighborhoods to check out, you need to know where to drive.  All you need to do is drive the main streets around the neighborhood and follow any signs for garage sales you see.  Don’t randomly drive on minor streets in subdivisions without having seen a sign; you won’t find anything.

Note that driving is key.  Garage sales are too spread apart to justify walking.  The average person walks at 2.5-3 miles per hour, 4 miles per hour is fast.  On a typical garage saling day, I will drive from 25-40 miles but as few as 20 miles on a day of many consistently exceptional sales.  You just cannot walk fast enough to justify the time you invest.  Some of my friends have suggested biking to sales on several occasions.  I think this is an absurd idea.  Yes, you can bike 15-20 miles per hour.  Still, this is too slow when you have a 30 mile loop that you follow and you need to continuously stop at sales for 1-7 minutes per sale.  And what happens when you get that $5 kayak? (my goal is to get a sea kayak for $10 or less; no luck so far).  Walking or biking just don’t make getting your purchases home convenient.

"So I Want to Go Garage Saling, When do I go?"

I decided to start my discussion of serious garage saling strategies with an introduction regarding when you should go saling.  This will be followed by a discussion of where you should go; I feel these topics need to be covered before things like bargaining because you can’t bargain if you can’t find any decent sales.

Really, the question of when you should garage sale can be broken down into three parts: what season, what day of the week, and what time of day.  Each of these will be addressed in turn.

In my experience, summer is prime garage saling season in Southern California.  Quality and volume of sales begins to falter sometime in late October/early November and don’t really pick up until sometime in March.  For those of you living in states that actually have weather; I imagine garage saling season is considerably shorter; I have heard that in the midwest garage sales only occur from late March to early June.  If you’re new to garage saling; I suggest going out your first time in either May or June.

Interestingly, the pattern I described above didn’t hold true for 2011.  Instead of sales peaking in July or August, sales were actually consistently poor in July through the end of  August; it wasn’t until September that we had a weekend of consistently good sales.  I’m unsure why sales peaked so late this year; in the previous four years I have been saling, early summer held the best sales.

Saturday is the day to go out garage saling.  There are sales that occur on Friday and Sunday as well, but only Saturday has enough sales to justify your time and gas.  Sure, if you happen to drive past a garage sale on Friday or Sunday, feel free to get out and look.  However, don’t head out Friday afternoon hoping to go to a bunch of sales.  You won’t find them.  Besides, Friday sales are almost always disappointing.  I, personally, have never bought anything on a Friday.

So now you know you should go some Saturday in either late spring or early summer.  But what time do you head out?  This, really, is a matter of personal preference, but I strongly suggest leaving your house at 7:00.  If you leave any earlier, not all of the sales are set up and you miss many sales in the areas through which you are driving.  Most sales are set up or almost fully set up by 7:00, so by getting there early you have one of the first opportunities to get the exceptional deals.  Also, if you leave much later, you’re cutting into the time you have available for saling.  Remember that many sales clean up by 10:30 or 11:00, especially in the summer.

Before you go out your first time, check Craigslist to see what the general opening time for sales in your area is (just search the “garage sales” section of “all for sale/wanted”).  You may find that sales in your area set up a different time.  When I was in Berkeley, California, I was surprised that sales start around 11:00 AM and end around 4:00 PM.  It’s worth your time to do the research.

If you happen to come across a sale where the people are either setting up or cleaning up, get out and look.  If they’re setting up, that means you are some of, if not the, first people to look at the stuff, meaning you potentially can get some amazing deals.  If they’re cleaning up, you can often offer next to nothing for things and get them because the sellers don’t want to take the stuff inside or to Goodwill.  Don’t feel awkward in these situations.  There is no room for awkwardness in garage saling.

There are a few times you should definitely avoid saling.  Any time in December has potential to be very disappointing.  Sales are slim even the first weekend of this month and as you get closer to New Year’s sales become slimmer and slimmer.  There are virtually no sales Easter and Thanksgiving weekends.  However, the weekends before and after Easter weekend tend to have a higher than average number of sales.  Finally, don’t go saling when it’s raining, when it’s been raining, or when rain is predicted.  If it rained Friday afternoon or night, don’t go; there won’t be many sales.  If it rained early Friday, it was clear for most of the day, and no further rain is predicted, there will most likely be sales as usual.

If it happens to start raining lightly while you’re saling, it’s sometimes worth it to continue on for a little while.  Oftentimes you can get good deals because people just want to get rid of the stuff instead of taking it inside.  Then, if it stops raining, you can continue on.

One thing to keep in mind is that three day weekends (ie, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc.) are variable days.  Some years the sales are remarkable; other days there aren’t many at all.  I would suggest going saling on these days; you can always turn around and go home if sales prove disappointing.

Next post will be a discussion of where to look for good sales and what areas to avoid.  Then, as I said, I will start introducing some bargaining strategies.

What I Assume is the Stereotypical "This is my New Blog" Post

I don’t read many blogs. The ones I do read tend to be rather science-y and avoid such frivolities as “This is my new blog!” This blog isn’t about science. This blog is about garage sales. I feel an introduction discussing my qualifications as a garage saler is important.

One important thing to note: I will refer to the act of going to garage sales as “garage saling” in this blog. Why? Because saying going to garage sales is too cumbersome. Garage selling is misleading; it sounds like you’re the one having the garage sale. Garage buying just sounds weird. Hence, garage saling. Those who partake in garage saling frequently are garage salers.

I started garage saling my senior year of high school (that explains my tag line). My friends and I were having a Christmas gift exchange. Gifts could cost a maximum of something on the order of $2. Deciding we didn’t want to spend our money at the dollar store, some of my friends and I decided we were going to go garage saling to acquire gifts for each other. We had talked about garage saling in the past but had never gotten around to it; the gift exchange was our excuse. We had fun and wanted to go again. Really, we — or at least I — were addicted from that first time.

I don’t remember what I bought that day. The first item I do remember purchasing at a garage sale is the first season of the Simpsons on DVD: $2. At the time I thought that was a great deal. Now I think I overpaid and I know I could have gotten it for cheaper, but I’ll come back to that another time.

I made my first garage sale purchase resale my freshman year of college. I had wanted a metal detector since I was six and obsessed with finding lost change; I finally found one at a garage sale for $0.50. To this day it remains one of my best purchases; a true steal even by my admittedly cheap standards. Anyway, I bought it and took it with me to the beach that day and quickly realized I hate metal detectors. They’re boring and hard to use; I found more change walking around the beach without the detector than with it. So, I put it on Craigslist and sold it two days later for $50. I got ripped off but this experience will be discussed more another time.

Since then, I’ve gotten serious about selling garage sale purchases on Craigslist. I average about one sale a week and make enough to cover all my garage sale purchases. A typical sale is $20-$30 — not bad when I usually buy items I intend to resell for $2 or less — but I have sold items for as much as $75 each.

I intended to follow with a discussion of some of my historic best purchases (just an excuse to brag, really) but I think I’ll save that for another post. I may tie it into my planned series on different bargaining techniques I have learned as an example of how the techniques work. I’ll also post some of my more exciting future deals and any bargaining techniques I used to acquire such deals so you, the reader, can live vicariously through me.

Anyway, here are some topics I intend to cover in the near future: bargaining techniques (including tricks for those who feel uncomfortable bargaining), when and where to go, reasonable prices for items, tips for reselling items for a profit, mistakes to avoid while bargaining, and tips for success at your next garage sale. If this sort of thing interests you, please, keep reading this blog. After all, garage saling is fun. What other hobby lets you make money and accumulate unnecessary junk?