Jimenez Julien
I build and support EstateTagSale, the cataloging, register and settlement system used by estate sale companies across the United States. My name is on the product, the support inbox and the invoices.
Why I built EstateTagSale
The first estate sale company I worked with was run by a woman in her fifties who had liquidated more than four hundred households and had never once been late to a setup. She was, by any measure, excellent at the trade. She was also spending most of every Monday reconstructing what had sold over the weekend from a stack of carbon receipts, a shoebox of price stickers and a legal pad. When an executor called and asked what the sterling flatware brought, she could usually find it. Usually is a terrible word to use with a family that just buried a parent.
What struck me was that no piece of software she had tried spoke her language. Retail point of sale systems assume a fixed inventory that gets restocked. Auction platforms assume lots move to a bidder online. Neither of them understands that in this trade the inventory is the entire contents of somebody's mother's house, that it is priced once during setup by eye and experience, that the price falls on a published schedule over three days, and that the whole thing ends with a document owed to a family who may be watching each other closely. The settlement statement is the deliverable. Everything before it is the work.
So I started at the end. I designed the settlement statement first, with tag numbers, categories, asking price, sale price, commission and expenses laid out so an executor or a probate attorney could read it without a phone call. Then I worked backward and asked what would have to be captured during the week for that document to produce itself. That is where the tag numbering by crew member came from. That is where the markdown schedule with category holdbacks came from. That is why price overrides at the register are recorded with a name and a timestamp instead of being silently allowed.
I spent the better part of two years in houses before I trusted the design. I have carried lamps down basement stairs in Ohio, watched two crews collide over duplicate tag numbers in a Georgia farmhouse, and stood at a register table on a Sunday afternoon while a buyer argued that a half off sign applied to a Persian rug that was clearly excluded. Almost every rule in the product came out of a moment like that. The people who taught me were the owners, most of them women who have run these companies for a decade or more and who have very little patience for software that adds steps.
How I work with operators has not changed since the first version. I answer the support email myself. When somebody calls with a problem in the middle of a sale, that call goes to a person who knows what a box lot is and why the jewelry case is treated differently. I ask for the ugly cases: the hoarded four bedroom, the sale that gets cancelled two days out because the family fights, the estate where a firearm shows up in a closet. Those are the situations that reveal whether a product is honest, and they drive what gets built next far more than any feature request list.
What I am accountable for is narrow and specific. The catalog is right, the arithmetic on the settlement statement balances, the data is backed up and yours to export, and nobody pays a percentage of a family's estate to use this software. If EstateTagSale ever costs you a sale or a referral because of something I built, I want to hear about it directly, and I will tell you plainly what happened and what I am doing about it.
Experience and expertise
- Founder and product lead of EstateTagSale, in daily operation with 268 US estate sale companies.
- Fifteen years building operational software for small service businesses that run on schedules, crews and site visits.
- On site observation in more than sixty estate sales across the Midwest, the Southeast and the Southwest before the first release.
- Working knowledge of probate timelines, consignment and commission contracts, and state sales tax collection on tangible personal property sold at estate sales.
- Publisher of the product through MLJ, SASU, the company that carries the legal and financial responsibility for it.
How this product is built and maintained
EstateTagSale ships small changes weekly and never during a Friday or Saturday, because that is when you are on a house. Every release is tested against a set of real sale scenarios donated by companies who agreed to let us copy their anonymized catalogs. Pricing pages, feature descriptions and the numbers quoted on this site are reviewed each quarter, and any figure that cannot be traced to account data is removed rather than rounded up. Support is handled in the same inbox that receives sales enquiries, so nobody has to explain a problem twice.
Editorially, the standard is simple. We do not publish a customer story without the owner's written approval of the exact wording. We do not describe a feature that is not live in every plan that lists it. We do not use a family's data for anything except running the sale it belongs to, and we do not run advertising trackers on this site. When we get something wrong on a page, we correct the page rather than quietly deleting it.
Published articles
Everything below was written for The Tag Room, the EstateTagSale magazine, and each piece answers a question owners ask on the phone during setup week.
- How do I price a whole house in two days without stalling the entire setup crew?
- Should I take an estate sale on commission or buy the contents outright from the family?
- What sales tax do I actually have to collect and remit on an estate sale in my state?
- What is the right markdown schedule for a three day sale and when do I break it?
- How should I handle firearms, ammunition and prescription drugs found during a household setup?
- Why do families argue about the settlement statement and how do I write one they trust?
- How did one operator run a hoarded four bedroom house and still clear it in eleven days?
- What is happening to brown furniture prices and should I still put it in the sale?
- How do I run the first hour of a sale when eighty people are waiting on the lawn?
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and the reply will come from me, generally within one business day. If you would rather talk through a specific house before you commit to anything, use the walkthrough form on the home page and tell me what you are dealing with.