37 Garage Sale Tips and Tricks: A Guide To Hosting Great Yard or Garage Sale

Guide to hosting great garage sales

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If you’re looking for Garage Sale Tips and Tricks, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve hosted and participated in dozens of very successful garage sales.

We’ve written this Garage Sale Guide to help you turn your unwanted treasures into cash. There are 37 ideas presented on this page to help you run an efficient and profitable yard sale at your home. Or to host a rummage sale for a charitable organization where you volunteer.

Hosting A Garage Sale – Where to Start

Have you ever wondered how to host a great and profitable garage sale? We’ve hosted dozens of yard or garage sales for us and for several non-profits we’ve been associated with.

It’s summertime and every weekend you’ll see the signs—“Huge Garage Sale,” “Monster Yard Sale,” “Moving Sale” or simply just “SALE” scrawled across neon-colored poster board. More than 60 million of us shop at garage sales, spending close to $1 billion each year.

We’ve hosted sales that included single families, multiple families, and huge fund-raiser sales. Each time, we’ve fine-tuned our strategies and improved our execution. You can make money, but without careful planning and preparation, you’ll spend more than you’d like to pay physically, emotionally, and financially.


Related Article: Retail Arbitrage: Make a Living Bargain Hunting


Why Host a Garage Sale?

Many people would rather donate their unused stuff than deal with the “hassle” of organizing a sale. While donating your items may be quicker and easier, holding a garage sale each year has many benefits.

• It helps you to continually purge unnecessary items from your home

• You get cash for your unused stuff—a real bonus if you’re digging your way out of debt (read this article in our member archive).

• Your kids earn money while learning to eliminate unused things.

• Your family gets to work together toward a common goal—like earning money for a special vacation or event. This is how we paid for much of our 18-day mega-vacation to Washington, D.C (read about it here).

• Local families can stretch their dollars at your sale.

• You can meet more people from your neighborhood.

Getting Others to Help With Your Sale

Large rummage sale on a drive way.

We won’t lie to you—hosting a garage sale takes a lot of work. But we can minimize our work and maximize the power of our selling with a multi-family sale. Some folks don’t have enough stuff for their own sale, but combining it with others can produce great results. We share the cost of advertising, and the work of putting up signs, setting up tables, and tearing down afterward.

We all get to laugh and spend time together. Plus, having more people involved provides more options for a better sale location. The easier the access to the sale, the more traffic you’ll have and the more you’ll sell.

We’ve seen entire streets, even gated communities, set aside specific weekends when sales are held each year. These types of events are magnets for crowds of buyers. We think multi-family is the only way to go!

Garage Sales with a Group of People – Tips

We do have a few rules for participating in our multi-family sales:

1. Must Be Present   We don’t sell stuff for other people. They must be there to agree to the final price. Misunderstandings over money put too much pressure on relationships.

2. Colored Dots   We assign each family or person a different-colored price tag / sticky dot. This helps us keep track of whose stuff is whose, and makes dividing the booty much easier.

3. Set-Up / Take Down   Everyone must help with some aspect of the preparation and clean-up of the sale, and contribute to the advertising costs (usually taken from the final proceeds of the sale).

4. Bring Tables   We ask all participants to bring anything they have to help display more items. The less cluttered and off the ground, the more we sell.

A Garage Sale Guide – Our Top Tips for Success

If you want to have a successful garage sale, it will take some mental and physical effort. And if you really want to pull off a large sale, you’re going to have to build a team of friends who will help shoulder some of the tasks.

How to Promote Your Garage Sale

There are several ways to get more people to show up at your sale. But only one has proven to bring in the most traffic.

5. Talk it Up

Get the word out to friends and neighbors who may want to participate or donate items for you to sell. Promote it on Facebook, NextDoor and any other social platform that reaches your local market. This is modestly effective.

6. Setting up Signs

4 garage sale signs on colored paper.

Use brightly colored poster board—all the same color—and broad-tipped black markers. Write neatly. We use 4-foot wooden stakes and staple 2-sided signs to each stake.

More signs equal more traffic. We’ve surveyed people and found that about 75 percent come because of the signs and less than 25 percent come because of other promotional methods. Save your signs for next year.

Include the words “HUGE SALE,” the nearest intersection and time.

Make sure that you follow your local ordinances regarding signs. In Phoenix, we’re not allowed to tap or tie garage sale signs to street light posts or other city signposts. We use metal or wooden stakes and staple the signs to them. We’ve also put out boxes with rocks in them and taped the signs to the box.

7. Sign Quantity

We put up a minimum of 20 signs. It’s a lot of work but it generates traffic. At major intersections, we’ll usually put 2 or 3 signs. We target traffic heading all directions except away from our sale.

Be sure to ask for permission if you’re placing a sign in someone’s yard. 

8. Use a Map

We make a copy of a city map in our area and pinpoint the intersections where we will put the signs. This map makes retrieving the signs easier, too.

9. Go in Twos

Send out pairs of people to put up signs the night before the sale. It’s safer and the work goes faster.

Send someone around during the sale to check that your signs are still in position. Sometimes winds can blow them around AND of course, sometimes there are unkind people (or just mischievous kids) who will knock signs down or take them.

Garage Sale Guide for Advertising

Newspaper with Garage Sale Ads circled.
With the demise of newspaper want ads, we check Craigslist, Offerup and Gsalr.com for garage sale listings. Along with driving our favorite neighborhoods looking for signs.

Promoting your sale is a must. But we’ve found that signs are the biggest traffic earner.

10. Advertise for Free Online

Posting an ad for your sale should be done on free sites like CraigsList.org, OfferUp.com, Gsalr.com, FacebookMarketplace, Facebook SwipSwap Groups and NextDoor. Write a brief description to advertise your sale. Include “multi-family,” “huge” or the number of tables you’ll have out to give readers an idea of the size of the sale.

Also, list big-ticket items. TVs always attract buyers; so do tools, appliances, camera equipment, bicycles, bunk beds, and furniture.

Be sure to include the starting time. We usually start at 7 A.M. and specify, “No Early Birds.” If we don’t set a specific start time, people show up as early as 5:30 A.M. knocking on our door. 

11. Talk to Your Neighbors

Letting your neighbors know about the sale does a few things.

  1. They may stop in and buy something.
  2. They may want to participate in your sale and promote it to their friends.
  3. They may want to host their own sale which can draw even more traffic in.

Some of the most successful sales we’ve attended have been community garage sales. This is where multiple families agree to all participate by putting up signs, promoting the sale and being out on their driveways selling stuff for the specified days.

12. E-mail

E-mail your local friends and ask them to help promote your sale. Be sure to include the date, location, and several key items.

13. Location

If you have your choice of several, pick one with easy access and lots of cars driving by. Also, consider ease of parking, and controlling foot traffic in and out of the site to prevent shop-lifting.

14. Which Days

Most hard-core garage salers will come out on Friday. Fridays and Saturdays are the most productive days. Plan the date months in advance. Avoid holiday weekends when many families travel.

Preparing for your Yard Sale

The physical setting up of the sale is very important. This affects walking traffic, shoplifting and selling more products.

15. Tables / Displays 

Gather as many tables as you can.  Use sawhorses with doors or pieces of plywood if you have to. You’ll sell more if what you display isn’t super-cluttered. We even build a rack for shoes out of wood scraps and put mini-shelves in the middle of tables to give us more space on the tables.

16. Gather Items

In our garage, we keep a Garage Sale Pile. Everything unwanted or unneeded is stored in boxes or stacked neatly there waiting for the next sale.

17. Pricing  

Price everything you can. Use your colored stickers and, as a safeguard, use a china marker to price the item in a second place. Price tags have a mysterious way of disappearing.

18. Zippered Bags

Put items with multiple parts in zippered bags and staple the price sticker above the zipper to secure the bag.

19. Hangers 

Ask a local dry cleaner for free hangers (ones they cannot reuse).

20. Hanging Clothes

Clothing stays neater and sells much better when hung up. Refolding piles of pawed-through clothes is a real pain! We drape a long series of swing-set-type chains attached diagonally between two block walls to display our clothes.

21. Pricing Clothes  

Rather than pricing each individual clothing item, we post a sign: Pants $X, Shirts $X, Jackets $X. It minimizes confusion and lost tags.

22. Similar Items

Group housewares, electronics, toys, linens, books, etc. Think in retail terms to make it easier for people to shop.

23. Tables  

We set up tables in our garage and on our patio the week before the sale and start categorizing items.

We’re able to price, organize and plan better than we could on the day of the sale. Line up tables in aisles with access from both sides if possible.

And you can butt tables together to prevent access to other areas of your yard.

24. Lock It Up

Lock your house and don’t invite people inside. If someone desperately needs to use a bathroom, have an adult escort him inside and wait outside the door until he’s done.

25. Rain or Shine 

We put up tarps, EZ Shades, anything to keep the heat down or rain off and comfort up. The colored tarps also add to the festive atmosphere.

26. Set-up

Because of the configuration of our long driveway, we set up all of our tables the night before and block the driveway with our van. One of our older kids sleeps in the van with our German shepherd. We’ve never had a problem. This allows us to sleep in a bit later—about 6 A.M.—and minimizes the early morning set-up.

27. Language Barrier  

If you have a large number of migrant workers or non-English speakers attending your sales, try to have someone in your group who speaks their language. It aids negotiations and helps keep everyone honest.

28. Item Placement

We put our largest items—furniture, TVs, microwaves—near the front of the sale and place toys in the back.

29. Call a Charity

Arrange for a truck to show up at the end of your sale or a couple of days later.  It provides motivation to box up and eliminate things that didn’t sell. We divide the remaining items into two piles: Donate and Save to Sell Again.

Garage Sale Guide-Tips for Hosting a Great Garage Sale!

How to Sell More at your Sale

30. Greeters  

Do it like Wal-Mart and greet everyone. It makes for a friendlier sale and minimizes shop-lifting. We also wander around the sale neatening things and availing ourselves for questions.

31. Power

Have an extension cord/power strip available for testing electronic items.

32. Concessions

We make $50 to $100 by selling home-baked goodies. It’s always amusing to have someone haggle over a 25-cent item then spend several dollars for hot cinnamon rolls ($1), muffins ($.25) and coffee ($.25). Keep your prices modest. We break out grilled hot dogs ($1) with soda or lemonade ($.50) around 10 A.M. and sell cookies and Rice Krispies© treats. The aroma helps sell, so cook it up.

33. Music

We always bring out a boom box and play happy music—patriotic, Disney songs or swing. Many garage salers are retired and appreciate Glenn Miller and other big bands from that era (so do we, for that matter!)

34. Rope It Off  

If you’re doing a multi-day sale, hang a rope or chain across the entrance at the end of the day. Attach a sign for those who drive by later: “Sorry, We’re Closed—Open Again at 7 A.M.” Then go inside and take a well-deserved nap.

How to Protect Your Money

Even though we want to trust people, we need to be cautious about how we collect, store and display the money we’re earning.

35. Access Control  

We control access to the sale by grouping large items at the end of our driveway to direct traffic past our “check-out” table where our cashier sits. There is only one way in and out of our sales, and it’s always past the cashier. Everyone is greeted arriving and is seen departing. It discourages shoplifting.

36. Cash Box or Waist Pouch

Protect the money you earn. If you have a cash box, assign one person (or rotate people) to sit at the cashier’s table at all times.

We always assign one of our kids and an adult to this task. Annette and Steve walk around during the sale and answer questions and negotiate prices.

If it’s a really big sale, after we’ve negotiated a price, we hand the buyer a slip of paper with the final pricing details on it for the cashier to see.

37. Cash Drops

When the amount in the cash box is over $100, we take most of it inside and stash it in an obscure location. This minimizes our exposure to loss.

38. No Checks

They’re just not smart. If someone is out of cash, refer him to the nearest grocer where he can buy a pack of gum and get cash back.

39. Count It Out  

Be careful when you receive money. As you count out change, leave the bills the customer gives you on the table where they can be seen. Say something like, “Here’s the change from your twenty (or ten, etc.).” We’ve had a few people attempt quick-change tricks and have become much more prudent in this area.

40. Tally Sheet

We keep a large poster board at the cashier’s table for tracking the earnings of each family or individual. Based on the colored tags and the final negotiated price, we write the amount of each transaction.

So if a person is buying, say, five things for $27—two from us for $5, one from family A for $10 and two from family B for $12—each family is credited with the exact amount.

At the end of the day, we total what each family earned and divide the money—subtracting any fixed expenses, such as advertising. It never balances exactly, but we get close and everyone is happy.

Hosting Great Garage Sales: Conclusion

If you host a sale regularly, this Garage Sale Guide Article will help you come up with your own systems and enjoy the event. For us, it’s a discipline to help us get rid of clutter and unnecessary items. But the benefits of meeting neighbors, socializing with our selling buddies and helping others clear out their stuff are worth far more than the money we make.

For more ways to save money with everyday household expenses, visit our Money Saving Tips Section on our website.

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