Doing your homework, knowing what you have, and making buying easy and fun are secrets for successful selling at garage sales.
Pricing
Your pricing needs to be both visible and reasonable and based on actual marketplace value. In the secondary market, an item is worth only what someone is willing to give you for it, and that figure is based solely on demand, rarity and condition, although occasionally a buyer will overpay out of sentimentality. This usually does NOT include out of fashion recently manufactured collectibles like Beanie Babiesor Pokemon cards, which are now considered toys, not collectibles, and can be found by the truckload at any sale.
Do Your Homework But. . .
Dealers live for the rare occasions when they unearth a piece of thousand dollar pottery at a sale marked $5. If you believe something might be valuable, spend the time on research! You don’t want to be the $10 seller of the Dave the Slave crock appraised at $10,000. on Antiques Road Show. This is important, even if you’ve always found the object ugly! Having said that, understand that common items like Mc Coy are not worth as much in your garage as they are in an Antiques store. Buyers are understandably willing to spend more when they need not get up at 6am to shop in someone’s driveway.
Price Tags or Stickers
Be very careful how your prices are actually placed on each object. Of course stickers are fine on plastic, pottery metal, etc, but DON’T slap a sticker on anything whose finish will be ruined when the sticker is removed. For example, if you have what you think might be a first or early edition of Gone With the Wind, the last thing you should do is put a sticker on the dust jacket. Dust jackets account for a high percentage of a volume’s value, and collectors prefer them in good condition without paper loss that results from the removal of a badly applied price sticker.
Toys vs. Collectible Toys
Collectors are looking for toys in their original boxes in good condition. Understand that the packaging is part of the value, and treat it accordingly, which means knowing which toys are toys, and which are collectibles. A board game with a tie-in to a popular 1960’s or 70’s TV show or movie is a collectible, and depending on condition will bring a higher price than a common board game such as Life or Monopoly of the same vintage. On eBay recently, Combat (1960’s TV) brought $44, The Monkees (1967 TV) $80, My Favorite Martian (1960’s TV) $21, and Family Feud (1978 TV) $13. On the other hand, Emergency (1974 TV) sold for 9cents, and Hollywood Squares and Password from the 60’s went unsold.
