Lucky for me there are no code enforcement laws or H.O.A. regulations against having yard sales where I live, but I am smart enough to know that if I tried to have a yard sale every weekend that would cause a problem. I am thinking of having up to 6 yard sales a year (weather & inventory permitting), 3 in the spring & 3 in the fall. Between the yard sales I will probably go to the flea market in the middle of summer and winter when there is less competition.

We had our first yard sale this weekend. I am going to compare it to selling at the flea market.

Last three times selling at the flea market, 2 Saturdays and 1 Sunday:
 Total sales                                          $553.00
Total expenses (gas & table rentals)      $105.00
Amount towards (C.O.G.S.)                  $448.00

Two day yard sale Friday and Saturday:
Total sales                                                $875.00
Total expenses (paper signs & drinks,ice)    $ 32.00
Amount towards (C.O.G.S.)                       $843.00

Not only did we nearly double our income doing a yard sale, we did it with the left over inventory that didn't sell at the flea market the last several trips! I am sure we would have made much more if we had all the original inventory that we took to the flea market.

I think having yard sales will be my primary market and the flea market secondary.

Other observations, furniture sold well but had to bring the price way down from what it was advertised on Craigslist. That kind of makes sense cause Craigslist is dying out for us, very few calls on furniture. The $.50 or $1.00 table works great for moving smalls at the flea market, customers avoided the $.50 - $1.00 table at the yard sale like the plague! They were much more comfortable finding something they liked and paying $2 to $5 for it or getting a hand full of things and paying $5 - $10.
                                                                                                         

FWIW. the WSJ Reported retail sales have dropped in the last two months.

This recession is far from being over and maybe becase of the length of it, it is finally effecting the second hand sales market. I fear that when the second hand market gets really, really bad we will be in more trouble than we want.

...Fingers Crossed...

Thinking about your post concerning the prospect on the economy and what impact it will have on the second hand sales market I just don't think it will ever disappear for good. In the poorest countries in the world people make thier living selling at vendor markets (like our flea markets). I just think we will probably see a lot of changes in the type of buyers and thier preferences. I think it will just be a matter of paying attention to what people are buying, and what they are willing to spend. We will probably have to be real loose on what we think the value of typical household goods are and kind of go with the flow and let the "market" determine the price of things.

One thing I have learned from people who have lived in Countries with failed or failing economies is when the majority of the population gets scared about the future thay stop buying everything except for essentials; food, drinks, medicine, personal care products. But if sales are slowing at the flea market or yard sale it doesn't necessarily mean that the economy is getting worse, it could mean many people are less fearful about the future so they are going back to Wal-mart or retail stores for their shopping. I also feel that the "picker" popularity is fading so I am seeing less people looking for things they can re-sell. You all might be experiencing this too. As bad as the recession has been I still don't get the feeling that people were turned in mass to the flea markets or yard sales as cool and affordable venues for shopping, I think people have just switched from the higher end stores to Wal-mart, Target, Dollar stores. Maybe the recession wasn't (isn't)  bad enough to really push people (in large numbers) into the flea markets.

I know, a bunch of rambling, but we will just have to keep on trucking, track the trends, and do our best. 

Think we fall into this a little. Started strong with resell avenues, but things change and we need new and better ones. Then life kicks in.

I have to say what has surprised me the most is how fast the marketplace changes on the selling side. We have all had to deal with the changes at the storage auctions from the buying side, but for me anyway, it seems like just when I've got it figured as to what customers want, what they are willing to pay, best venue to sell something, the customers change thier buyer behavior and i mean other then typical seasonal changes. What worked last Spring, isn't working this Spring.

Last time at the Flea Market I couldn't sell DVDs for $2 a piece, had to sell for $1 to move them. When I first started I was getting $4-$5 a piece for them, last summer-fall I was selling them for $3 a piece. Now I can see maybe a slight change in price depending on how new the titles are, but going from $5 for used DVDs to $1 in 2 years is a huge change.

Of the units I have won, only two had what I would call real collections in them. One only had foreign coins of little value. The other had some foreign silver coins along with foreign coins with little value. I have found many empty coin collecting albums, so the question is: Did they intend to start collecting valuable coins, but never had the money to do it? Did they take the valuable coins out of the albums and just put the empty albums in storage? Did the facility owner/manager/employee take the coins out of the albums?(doubtful on this, why not just take the full album).

I have heard of others finding coin collections here and there in units, so I don't think it's rare to find them, just rare you will find one worth tens of thousands of dollars.

1. I won't be able to assess trends in local auction attendance until the first of July. Ive been out of town for a couple of weeks and no big auctions scheduled until the end of June aorund here.

2. Online trends & forums: Definitely the interest is dropping on forums, and there has been some noticeble downward trends in "storage auctions" across the net. Interest hit a low this past May, but the SW season 3 promos have peaked interest again, atleast on the internet. Remains to be seen if that translates into more newbies at the auctions.

My personal thought is the third seaon of SW California will peak some interest in newbies and even bring back some folks who tried it before to see if the prices have come down. I think we are still in for a little bit of ebb and flow due to folks who came out over the last two years cause of the TV shows, got burned, lost money, but come back out to see if the bidding comes down, as the bidding comes down, they win units, word gets out, more show back up, prices go back up again, more people lose money again, drop back out, prices go down again, etc, etc, etc. But all in all I just got a feeling that prices on units across the board are going to start trending downward. My prediction is we are going to start seeing auctions where those who have been doing this a while and recognize "hidden" value of the items showing are going to be able to start stealing really great units out from under the newbies, but at the same time there are still going to be many over-priced units being won.

In my local the first season of SW Texas seemed to have a much bigger influence on bringing people out to auctions then the first season of SW California, so I am not to concerned about the third season bringing a lot of folks out but who knows, we will just have to wait and see. Being in the South few people want to move a lot of furniture and other stuff in 90 degree plus heat, so this summer should still be good for getting the large packed out units with furniture. Will just have to see what happens when the weather turns nice again in the fall.

I think in our little forum here we are getting to "meat and potatoes" discussions and all the newbie questions have been asked and all the treasure stories have been told, and it turns out our treasure stories can't compete with Alan & Ton so unless you are a real storage auction buyer the interest in reading these posts is waning.

My .02 

Yes, a bigger rate of return percentage is possible with a cheap locker. Here's another way to look at the comparison for expenditure vs. return.

Thats a great little spread sheet comparing rate of return with nominal return (actual cash back). One caveat, other expenses are missing from that spreadsheet that could hugely affect rates of return and total profit. The first expense that comes to mind is fuel. That little junk unit with 900% return would turn into a loss if you included say $25 fuel costs, where as the expensive unit with only 100% return could assume the fuel costs with little change to overall rate of return and profit. Cheap units can be profitable but as an auction buyer you will probably want to buy multiple cheap units per auction day to spread the additional associated costs across all the units. Taking into consideration fuel only, as long as you can load everything while you are there then there is no additional cost in fuel to clean-out those cheapy "garbage" units.

Movieman, I know you know this, just wanted to point it out for the other players in the game. 

Never have understood the collecting of shot glasses of spots you've never been......but see your point.


Had a box of them I set on the curb. They sat there for days. Think it was bums that finally started taking them......

Thats actually one of the things I collect as souviners from units I buy is I keep the shot glasses if there are any nice & interesting ones. They don't take up much space so my place won't look like Fred Sanford's living room any time soon. By-the-way, shot glasses in vacation spots are hitting the $10-$12 mark new now.