Free tool
Estate sale settlement and take home calculator
Put in the numbers from your last full house and see what the family takes, what you keep, and what an hour of crew time on that job was actually worth.
Free tool, no sign up
Estate sale setup and tagging day planner
Estimate how many days of tagging a household really needs before preview night, so you stop promising a Friday you cannot hold.
The date you promise the family at intake is a pricing decision disguised as a calendar decision. Say Friday of next week on a house that needs nine tagging days and you will either open with an unpriced basement or push the sale and lose the weekend you already advertised.
This planner works from the numbers you can estimate on a walk-through: roughly how many lots the house holds, how many people will actually be writing tags, how fast they price, and how much of the good material needs comps. It returns elapsed tagging hours, research hours, setup days and the paid crew hours to build into your quote.
Your result
Elapsed tagging hours
20.0
Clock hours with your whole tagging crew on the floor.
Research hours
4.0
Usually yours, usually at night, usually underestimated.
Setup days needed before preview
3.4
Add hauling and staging days on top of this figure.
Paid crew hours for pricing
64
What the pricing pass alone costs you in labor hours.
If setup days runs past the date you promised, cut lot count by boxing lower value goods before you cut the pricing pass.
How to estimate lot count on a walk-through
Estimate by room, not by house. A standard kitchen boxed and grouped sensibly is usually a few hundred lots, a bedroom with a full closet somewhat less, and a workshop or a sewing room can hold more than the rest of the floor combined. Walk with a notepad and write a number per room before you leave, because your memory of a basement is always kinder than the basement.
Then adjust for how the family lived. Collectors and quilters and woodworkers create dense rooms with high lot counts and slow tagging. Downsizers who have already given things to children leave a thin house that prices in a day and a half.
Where tagging speed actually goes
A steady tagger grouping and pricing everyday household goods moves quickly. Speed collapses in three predictable places: anything that needs a decision about whether it is worth researching, anything that has to be tested or plugged in, and any room where the crew is still moving furniture around while trying to price.
The fix is sequencing rather than hurry. Get the house staged room by room ahead of the taggers, set a rule about what gets set aside for research instead of stopping the line, and keep the twenty genuinely uncertain lots on one table where you can work them in the evening.
Questions about this calculator
What lots per hour should I use if I have never measured it?
Start at thirty for general household goods with an experienced tagger and drop to fifteen or twenty for garages, workshops and collections. Time one room on your next job and you will have your own number.
Does this include hauling and staging days?
No, it covers the pricing pass and the research behind it. Most full houses need one to two days of unpacking, moving and table building first, so add those before you promise a preview night.
My setup days number is bigger than the calendar allows. Now what?
Reduce lot count rather than pricing quality. Box and group low value goods, sell the workshop by the shelf or the lot, and keep individual pricing for the material that actually carries the sale.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The estate sale week run sheet
One page that carries a household job from the intake walk-through to the settlement check, in the order the work actually happens.
Where this figure comes from during sale week
What you have on screen is an estimate built from numbers you entered by hand. The same figures fall out of a job on their own once the lots, the markdown days and the contract deductions are recorded as the household sells. Ask for a demo and we will rebuild the settlement for a house you have already cleared, so you can check our arithmetic against the statement you sent that family.