The estate sale week run sheet

Intake and contract

• Walk every room, closet, attic and outbuilding with the executorOpen the doors you would rather not open. The garage rafters, the crawlspace and the locked cabinet are where the surprises live, and pricing your commission before you have seen them is how a job goes underwater.
• Ask by name about firearms, ammunition, medications and documentsDo not ask if there is anything unusual, because families say no. Name the categories out loud and write the answers down, then plan the handling before setup begins.
• Write the commission, the deductions and who pays for disposalEvery deduction that will appear on the settlement statement belongs in the contract first: advertising, dumpster, haul-away, extra crew. A deduction the family reads for the first time on the statement is where disputes start.
• Set the sale dates and the hard clean-out date in writingTie the clean-out to the closing or the handover the family has already committed to. Put the date in the contract so the markdown schedule has a real deadline behind it.
• Photograph the house as you found it before anything movesA wide shot of every room takes ten minutes and settles any later question about what was in the house on day one. Keep them attached to the job record.
• Confirm who has authority to sign and who else will be watchingFind out early whether an attorney, a trustee or a second sibling reviews the statement. Knowing the audience changes how much item detail you should be capturing during the pricing pass.

Setup and the pricing pass

• Stage room by room ahead of the taggersNever let tagging and furniture moving happen in the same room at the same time. Get a room emptied, sorted and on tables, then send the pricing crew in behind it.
• Price in one direction and do not double backWork a fixed room order and finish each room before moving on. Wandering back to reprice yesterday's kitchen is the most common way a two day pricing pass turns into four.
• Set aside the research lots instead of stalling the lineAnything you cannot price in thirty seconds goes on one designated table with a numbered tag. Work that table in the evening rather than letting one signed piece stop three taggers.
• Photograph and record the high value lots individuallyJewelry, marked pottery, art, firearms transferred out, and anything over a threshold you set. The photo, the lot number and the price live together so the record answers questions later.
• Write the markdown ladder before preview nightDecide the Saturday and Sunday discounts, the exclusions, and what a dealer offer has to beat, and tell your crew. Deciding it on Saturday morning in front of buyers costs you money every time.
• Set the walk lanes, the checkout position and the do not sell zoneBuyers should flow past tables and out to one checkout without crossing the crew. Rope or clear the room that holds anything not in the sale.

The sale days

• Number the line before the doors openHand out numbers in the order people arrived and set a house capacity your crew can watch. The lawn sorts itself out when the rule is announced early and applied to everyone.
• Open a second checkout before the line demands itThe first hour on a good house is the whole weekend's crowd compressed. Two people ringing lots into one sale record beats one person and a line stretching into the dining room.
• Write every hold on the tag and in the recordA hold that lives only in a crew member's memory becomes an argument at four o'clock. Note the lot, the name, the phone number and the pickup deadline.
• Apply the markdown ladder on schedule, not on moodAnnounce it, apply it at checkout and hold the line on exclusions. Buyers and dealers learn your schedule, and a company that discounts early trains them to wait.
• Close each day with a total the family could readReconcile card batches and cash against the sold lots before you leave the house. Doing it at the end of three days instead means finding a discrepancy you no longer have the memory to explain.

Clean-out and settlement

• Sort the leftovers into dealer, donation and dumpster pilesMake the call fast on Sunday evening while the crew is still there. Every extra day the leftovers stay in the house costs you crew time and pushes the family's closing date.
• Collect and file the donation and disposal receiptsThe receipts support the deductions on the statement and are what an executor or an accountant will ask for. Attach them to the job record the day you get them.
• Reconcile all card batches against the sale recordMatch settled deposits to sale day totals before you build the statement. Corrections are cheap now and expensive after a check has gone out.
• Send the itemized statement within a week of clean-outGross by day, every deduction the contract named, the net, and enough item detail that an heir can find the piece she is thinking about. Speed does more for trust than any amount of formatting.
• Walk the empty house and photograph it before you hand back keysSame rooms, same angles as day one. It closes the job cleanly and ends any question about what condition the house was left in.
• Ask for the review and the referral while the house is still emptyThe week after clean-out is when the family is most grateful and most likely to be talking to a realtor, an attorney and a neighbor with the same problem.