Month: July 2018

Our menu of services is getting bigger–introducing online estate sales

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Would you like an estate sale with your transition?

We do moves your way. Every project plan starts with our client choosing from our menu of services. Most downsizing clients ask us to pack and unpack; if we were a restaurant that would be our house special. Many like to have our coaching and hands-on help sorting. Others want our experienced eyes to help with home staging to get those million dollar photos for their real estate listing. And others ask us to ship goods to family and friends. We do all that and everything in between. But there’s one service nearly all our clients ask for: help finding homes for things they no longer need through sale and donation.

Over the past eight years, we have developed multiple selling channels. We get goods to the place where they will bring the best return for clients. We’re not appraisers, but our team members have many years of experience and knowledge of “stuff.” Our general knowledge combined with the expert knowledge of our selling partners adds value for our clients. We like to highlight the hidden gems that dazzled with sale results, but our real skill is in our ability to get all kinds of things to the right market and to find good places to donate the rest.

Since the beginning, we’ve worked with a combination of auction houses, consignment shops and dealers. They are still key for items that have high value and/or high desirability.  But over the past three years there has been an growing challenge: the number of baby boomers downsizing is growing exponentially. It’s wonderful that people are making changes to better fit their lifestyle now. But they all have furniture and goods they no longer need. The local resale and donation markets are full to the brim. Things we could consign easily five years ago, we have trouble donating now.

That’s why we launched our own e-commerce site and opened a b&m shop, Nextstage Vintage. We offer expanded selling services geared specifically towards on-trend vintage and niche technology equipment for our clients. NextStage Vintage now serves as the mothership for our larger network of online selling venues–we list items on as many as six additional online marketplaces such as Etsy, Ebay, Chairish and Apartment Therapy Marketplace and actively use social media to promote those items.

We have assiduously steered clear of running estate sales because selling goods is only one aspect giving clients great transitions. Estate sales require an entirely different business model that we’ve always felt would take away from what we do best…getting people from where they are now to where they want to be without the stress and the worry. And we have been able to do a good job getting goods with resale value sold via our trusted partners and our own selling site.

But with the amount of goods coming onto the resale market continuing to grow, we have been looking for another way to efficiently help our clients clear out and find value for their no longer needed things. And we’ve found it! We’re happy to announce that we’re expanding our menu of services to include online estate sales cataloged and managed by us and hosted on MaxSold.com. Online sales are a more efficient and less complicated estate sale model than the traditional ones, and they are a natural fit with our other services.

MaxSold has been an industry partner to the National Association of Senior Move Managers (NASMM) for a few years; our peers in parts of the country with fewer available selling venues heartily endorse their process and results. We like that they enable us to sell efficiently in a way that’s convenient for our clients.

Here’s how a NextStage-managed online estate sale works:

  • Items that are no longer needed but have resale value are offered for sale via an online listing with photographs and a description (similar but less detailed than the ones we prepare for items sold online). We can do this over time, as we sort with a client, or all at once, after a client has moved to their new home.
  • Once all the items are lotted and entered, MaxSold hosts and promotes the sale on their website. All bids start at $1. A sale lasts from 5-10 days, with bidding taking place over that time period.
  • After the sale closes, buyers are required to pay for their items online. No money changes hand onsite. Buyers then pick up their items at the selling location (or our office) during specified pickup windows.
  • MaxSold generates a check for the seller within 7 days of the close of the sale.

The simplicity of a MaxSold downsizing sale is what makes it appealing. It allows the market to determine the value of an item. No haggling, no negotiating, no cash on the pickup day. The pickup for the sale either at the client’s home or at our office. And best of all, it’s fast.

We will continue to send select items to our trusted local selling partners as we always have. But by adding the additional option of estate sales to our menu, we are able to offer faster and more complete selling services in a cost effective way.

We have one MaxSold auction currently running and we will be holding two more this month. Check our Facebook page for updates and to see these sales. Change can be good, and we’re excited to offer this new service on our menu to make us a bigger and better one stop shop for those making transitions and dispersing estates.

 

 

 

Opening drawers, opening memories

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memory box

“The hard part about going through all the boxes and drawers is that if I open the wrong one, I find that hours pass as I go through the contents.” Wise words from one of our clients who is sorting through decades of the ephemera of life in preparation for a move to an apartment after the unexpected passing of his wife a year ago.

In the course of living, we squirrel things away. We buy boxes of holiday cards on sale and stash them for the next year. We stockpile canning jars above and beyond our jar needs. We keep periodicals with articles we might want to refer to or get creatively inspired by. When you are thinning out in preparation for a move, those boxes are fast to sort. Keep, donate, recycle–not a lot of heavy thinking in boxes of the generic stuff of everyday life.

The boxes that take time are the ones that have memory-enriched not-generic stuff. It’s not boxes of stuff you can pre-identify as memory centric, like photographs. It’s boxes and drawers hiding things that catch you unaware because you had forgotten those things were there. Things that have accumulated over the years that have associations to people, places and adventures take extra time to work your way through and sometimes require a tissue or two too. Maps and brochures from trips, clothing left from teen years in an adult child’s bureau, handwritten notes from people long since passed away, yearbooks and programs from school plays…those are the things that take time.

As move managers, we frequently spend time with our clients going through those memory-enriched boxes and drawers. One member of our team spent a July afternoon hunched in an attic with a client going through a box of accumulated personal papers–among them the draft of an introduction from a luncheon where she introduced Eleanor Roosevelt. A hot humid attic is not everyone’s cup of tea, but for our team member, it was an afternoon of stories told by our client about her life that she will never forget.

The things you find rarely have historical or financial significance to anyone outside those who were involved. But they can be nice bits of anecdotal family history for future generations. Using your phone to snap a photo is the fastest, easiest and most convenient way to do that if the actual document isn’t worth keeping. (This means you need to organize your photos digitally, but that’s another blog post for another time.)

You may have goals for the number of boxes you want to sort through in a week, but don’t judge yourself harshly if you don’t meet that goal. If you find a particularly tough drawer or box of things, give yourself permission to skip it and come back to it later. Of course, our favorite solution to keep you moving forward is to work with a move manager. Sorting through decades of ephemera alone can be lonely, but doing it with someone else is usually a much more pleasant experience. Some of our clients tell us we make it fun…and we’ll second that because we truly enjoy that part of the job.

drawer memories

Lest you think that move managers have an easier time with drawers and boxes full of forgotten memories, I can testify that we can be as challenged by it as the next person.  I had to move a dresser, and took the opportunity to sort it out. 80% of the contents (hats, gloves, rain gear) was sorted quickly, but 20% made time stand still. Among the memories: a enlargement of my husband and son at an elementary school math night; our much missed canine’s bandana, winter collar and Halloween bow tie; a photo of a beloved friend who died of AIDS 24 years ago; half a bag of water balloons from when the kids were not yet grown up; and possibly the most emotional thing…the original pink drawer lining paper as folded by my mother at some point in the 1960s. Unexpected but welcome memories that took extra time and more tissues that I should probably admit to to handle. If only I knew a move manager…