r/estatesales

I am an estate auction company that had something unusual for me happen this past weekend. I sell everything (obviously not food) that is still packaged and/or clean. I will preface this by saying I normally get homes where it’s a second home, a home where the owners passed or has not been listed for sale yet.

In my homes I’ve been selling large lots of usable cleaning products, linen closets of sealed household/toiletries items. I try to pass savings where I can and keep items out of landfills prematurely. They generally sell very well.

I had my auction posted for a week and when we went today for pickups and I started grouping everyone’s items I noticed there were items missing (owners have been in Florida prior to me starting so was absolutely not them) the home is sold and is going through its contract faze, inspections were already complete so the owner and I figured there wouldn’t be any issues. I was wrong. A whole lot of brand new cleaning items were gone, toiletry closet was picked through with very little left (obviously customer is being refunded with sincere apologies). I have an idea of what happened because I have always been told about this type of dishonesty, I’m sure most of you have an idea on who actually has access to the house at the point of it being listed. Of course I did notify the homeowner.

What do other estate companies do in scenarios like this?

Any other advice moving forward?

For all the company owners out there can I get some help with ideas on doing cleanouts?

We have found that the charitable organizations in my area will pick and choose what they want to take and leave the junk. We have found a couple of people that will clean it out fully, and the nicer items they receive are basically their payment for doing the full clean out, but we are having some problems with that.

I’m thinking that our best option might be to rent a dumpster on site ourselves to get all of the trash out and then allow the charitable organizations to come in and get the good things.