The Mega Process

It became obvious early on that a sale at the house would be impossible. Amazingly, all of this merchandise came from an 1,100 sq ft home, with a very full basement and garage. We lovingly called it the beaver dam, as everything you see was piled into mountains of loose items from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. To give this incredible collection the attention and research it deserved, we decided to dedicate our entire showroom to project. This meant clearing the showroom first, and we had to do right by the clients who were in mid-term. So we selected all of the inventory that still had good time left and strategically moved it all into numerous other houses that were scheduled for sales in the coming weeks. The items that were near the end of their term were sold at a big liquidation event, and we were left with a completely bare and empty space. We gathered all of the shelving and tables we could find or buy, and laid out the floor plan to maximize display space and shopper safety.

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And then we dug in. For seven weeks, the crew tore through the mountains, filling our trailers again and again. Our largest cargo trailer is 24 ft long by 8 ft wide, and it made 10 bursting-at-the-seams trips from the house to the showroom. The dump trailer was filled 22 times with trash along the way. We set up stations and had the crew broken into 3 groups - one group to take things off the trailer to the pricing station, one group to research and price, and one group to display throughout the store by category. There were so many unique and unusual items requiring deeper research that we created a logjam at the pricing station, so we resorted to displaying some of it without pricing. Then we poured back through the store for countless hours filling in pricing wherever we could. It was the first and only time in our history that we had to outsource some work, and we called upon some great experts for help pricing. (I prefer to call them friends!)

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After 14 days of selling, each 6 hours long, we held a live auction for the leftovers. The remnants of each category was auctioned in its entirety in single lots, which greatly reduced our post-sale work. Within 10 days of the end of the sale, we had the showroom completely refilled and reopened for business-as-usual with nearly 50 different clients’ worth of belongings in stock, ready for sale.

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In the end, we had time to reflect on what this experience really meant. It meant that we had uncovered a vast treasure of American history, hoarded by one man for decades, and we helped disperse it to hundreds of passionate enthusiasts. It meant we created an economic tidal wave for collectors and resellers that will last for years. It meant we had gained copious amounts of knowledge and experience in one massive injection. It meant many new and lasting friends. And                 it meant that when it comes to property liquidation and real estate preparation,                     there is no one as capable, equipped, or complete as we are.