At a glance

Where: Charlotte, NC
Pieces sold: 12
Median time to sell: 8 days
Client nets: 85%

The situation

A doctor and his wife had raised their children in a house of more than 4,000 square feet. The children had moved out, and the two of them were moving to a 55-and-over community with a fraction of the space. What was left behind was a whole house of furniture and belongings: bedroom suites, a formal dining set, sofas, rugs, a home gym, a stereo system, boxed toys, signed sports memorabilia and art. They were not in a hurry to sell any of it for the sake of selling. They were in a hurry for the house to be empty, because the new place was waiting and the move-out date was fixed. With a few weeks to go there was still a house full of things, and the question was what happened to each of them if buyers did not show up in time. Late in the process the cleaning crew's start was moved earlier, which shortened the runway further.

What we did

We photographed and catalogued the house room by room and listed the pieces worth selling on our own storefront and across the marketplaces, with the family keeping 85% of every sale after fees. Furniture was sold where it stood, because a dresser sold out of the bedroom costs nothing to move, store or extract. With a few weeks left, we sat down and wrote the plan. It went to the family as one page with three options for finishing, and a recommendation. The first stepped prices down on a schedule and then, on a set day, we would buy whatever was left. The second was a cash buyout of everything up front. The third was an online estate sale. Every option ended the same way, with the house empty one way or another, and the family chose the one with the most upside and a guaranteed finish. They liked that the plan did not depend on luck. We held every price step on schedule and ran the buyer pickups ourselves. The collectibles were different. Signed memorabilia and art reward patience and a national audience, and they had no reason to leave on the same clock as the sofas. We took those out of the house, stored them, and kept selling them for the family.

The outcome

The house was empty on the morning it had to be. Every piece that remained was either sold to a buyer or bought by us, so nothing was left for the family or the cleaners to deal with. What the couple chose to donate went to the VA, as both of them are veterans. The larger pieces found buyers along the way, among them an inlaid mahogany sideboard, a carved king bed, a rowing machine that held its value better than almost anything in the house, and a boxed toy lot that sold on eBay. The family kept 85% of every sale while those sales ran and moved on the date they planned. The collectibles we stored are still being sold for them. The deadline was met, and the value in the house was recovered anyway.

We never publish a client's name or address. The photographs are our own catalog shots of the pieces themselves, taken while we inventoried. Every figure below is a real completed sale from our own ledger, linked to the item it belongs to.

I settled my own parents' estates in 2021 and did it badly — most of it ended up in a storage unit I paid for over the next several years. That's why we work this way. — Charles · Read the whole story →