Estate Sales

Sorting, pricing, staging, marketing, and running the sale itself — all of it. The sale is held at the property, which is where estate sales get their prices: buyers see things in the rooms they were used in, and a house full of furniture sells better in the house than in photographs of a warehouse.

Pricing is the part families get wrong on their own, in both directions. Things people assume are valuable often aren't — most brown furniture, most china, most collectible plates. Things people nearly leave at the curb regularly aren't — mid-century pieces, tools, shop equipment, certain costume jewellery, anything a specific collector wants. Knowing which is which is the service.

Marketing is what fills the driveway. A sale nobody knows about is a garage sale with better inventory.

Forty percent of gross sales — squarely normal for the trade, where commissions typically run 30 to 50 percent — plus a retainer up front that is credited against that commission rather than added to it.

Everything comes out of what the sale makes. The incentive is aligned by design: the harder the contents work, the better both sides do.

Not every house is, and being told so early saves everyone a month. Naming the ones that aren't is the only thing that makes the first list mean anything.

Worth a sale: furniture in usable condition, tools, a workshop, garage and shop equipment, appliances, collections of almost any kind, sporting and outdoor gear, musical instruments, and the mid-century pieces people routinely mistake for junk. Geography plays in too — Park City houses, second homes especially, clear this bar more reliably than anywhere else on the service list.

Usually not worth a sale: a house that's mostly clothing and papers, worn or damaged furniture, and — most common of all — a house the family has already been through twice, where anything with value left with a relative months ago. That's a cleanout, and it'll cost you a great deal less than a sale that doesn't gross enough to be worth running.

If it's the second one, you'll be told that on the phone. Nobody's interests are served by staging a sale for a house that doesn't have one in it.

This is where an estate sale usually falls apart with anyone else. The sale ends, the good things are gone, and the family is left standing in a house that is still two-thirds full of everything that didn't sell — and now they need a second company.

Not here. Whatever doesn't sell routes straight into donation or haul-off on the same job. If there's a deck that has to come off or a basement that has to come back to studs before the property lists, that happens too, because he's a licensed contractor and not an estate sale company that has to call one.