Welcome to Prestige Estate Services
The Estate Sale and Apprasial Experts
We are a national estate sale company that has over 30 years of experience behind it’s executive team. We had humble beginnings we’ve been able to expand across the country. Listen to a real call below.
We’ve got answers to your questions
Listen to a real phone call from an individual inquiring about our services that goes over 95% of most questions.
What Happens At The End Of An Estate Sale?
1. What happens after the estate sale has concluded?
Do you provide any clean-out or haul-away services of unwanted or old broken items or items that are missing parts and didn’t sell?
Short answer? Yes, but not directly and here is the important reason why.
Better answer? Many poorly run estate sale companies offered, and many still do today, a “Free Haul- Away” when what was really happening, was and unfortunately still is, many companies are intentionally marking items at significantly higher than fair market values, making the client feel good during the pricing process of the prep phase of the sale. “Oh, honey, look, they have $250.00 on the lamp downstairs! I paid $275.00 for it! I’m amazed they can get 250.00 for it?” When in reality their intention is to never sell it at $250.00. This causes conflict of interest. Now they tell their clients, “Oh yeah, sorry, it didn’t sell we had lots of traffic too, but nobody really wanted it I guess.” But, had it been priced appropriately let’s say at $125.00, it would have sold.
Now it’s sitting there in the living room, the sale has ended and they will now tell you, “Oh, we will haul it away and donate it don’t worry we will get it cleaned out for you that’s the least we can do.” But they take the item and store it in their storage unit or in some cases a store and then sell the items for fair market values themselves, separate of you, and separate of your estate sale and they keep the money. When it should have been money you earned had it been priced correctly at the sale initially.
Ultimately, it’s scam. So sad! Don't let this be you!
Be very leery of anyone offering FREE HAUL-AWAY with the sale.
THIS IS WHY THIS IS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST. Ideally you want to use a third party for haul- away and donation services.
Another point is, most estate sale companies don’t carry the proper insurance to cover haul-away and donation services should there be an accident or damage done to the home or persons involved in the hauling process then you can be held liable for personal and even the property damage done to your home. Leave this to the professionals. We work with several great providers and your manager can provide you a list of these names.
Years back when we were in our infancy, we also used to provide in-house, haul-away and donation services. Unfortunately, the cost of insurance for this line of work, cost of vehicles and maintenance, and other various costs became too much for us to continue to pass along to our clients. Ultimately, we are professionals at estate sales, not haul-away donation services. We figured out over the years, it makes much more financial sense for our clients that we and they, are better off by us providing a handful of names who specialize in haul-away and donation services to our clients as often their service is free if you donate the items. We had to charge by the cubic yard and it got expensive to us and then we in turn had to pass this along to our clients and it was simply, too expensive. Now we offer ways to complete this process easily and best of all, often it’s FREE! Below are some contacts of companies we have used in the past. Your estate sale manager will also have some names specific to your location. www.1800GotJunk.com www.BudgetDumpster.com www.ArcThrift.com www.DAV.org www.CollegeHunksHaulingJunk.com www.teenchallenge.org
2. What information and paperwork do you receive after the sale is completed?
You will receive documentation that is processed by our accounting department. It will come in the form of a PDF (Portable Document Format) and a hard copy along with your check, that will reflect the categories of items, quantities in each category and the overall gross sales from each respective category. It will show the amount of taxes collected and
paid and the breakdown of your commission or amount earned from the sale. There is no currently no way to individualize every item, due to the time it would take to itemize all items sold in a home and associate a specific price and product description. This would literally take months to prepare a sale this way and we would have charge so much it would be impossible. The average sale, typically sells thousands of items at a sale event.
