How to Sell Used Furniture

Video Transcript

"My name is William Perkinson, and I'm here to tell you how to sell used furniture. There's two types of furniture. One will be a hard types. This...a bookcase or a desk, chest, or tables. And then there's upholstered furniture. Upholstered furniture's a little different. It needs a little more cleaning, a little more maintenance to make it...to get it on the market quickly, but it still sells. So one man's trash is another man's treasure. Looking at this one, what we want to do, we've gotten it cleaned off. There's a little dust, a few nicks. We want to take a little furniture polish and clean it up because even though it may have some nicks and scratches in it to you, that's advanced patina to the purchaser, and that's what gives it that aged look -- the patina. But we...we're going to clean it up, we're going to get the dust off and we'll buff up the top a little bit, make it look...make it look like it hasn't been in your garage for the last 10 years. Maybe it has, maybe it hadn't. We'll use the duster. Make sure there's no cobwebs in it. All right. Now, we're almost ready. What we want to do, we want to make sure we know exactly how big it is -- the size of it -- because when we advertise this, to get attention, we want to...we want to be able to tell them that it's 32 inches high. It's going to be roughly 36 inches wide, 37 with the top, and it's a two-shelf bookcase. Now, as far as advertising goes, you can pay a lot of money and...or you can...or you can advertise it for free. You know, look in...your...if your community has a penny saver newspaper or thrifty nickel type of thing that...where they have one item less than 100 dollars, usually that type of thing is free. The regular newspaper, you're probably going to have to pay per word or per line. But also, you can look online. You can advertise on Craigslist, which is usually free. And on that, you'll need to know the dimensions, and it's good to put a picture there. So if you've got your digital camera, take a picture. Take it from two different angles so that it really gets to know what it is. If it's got a particularly bad spot on it or if it's got a leg that, say, was broken off and repaired, you might want to take a picture of that and say, you know, "This is...just so you know, this is here, and this is how I replaced it or repaired it." And generally, people will overlook that because if they're buying used furniture, they know it's going to...it's not going to be in mint condition. We're not talking about antiques. We're just talking about good, sturdy, usable furniture. So we've got it. We're going to advertise it in the newspaper. We're looking for free. Also if you're...if you have a planned community, you may have a website in your community where they'll let you advertise for free. But we're going to have a garage sale. We're going to put it out there. If you're going to have a garage sale, it's even better because you'll have more than one piece of furniture. But if you've advertised, it's ready to go, it's ready for somebody to take it to their home and make it theirs. They know how large it is, they have a picture of it if you're...if you're online. And remember, one man's trash is another man's treasure. You can...you can make some good money selling used furniture. My name's William Perkinson, and that's how to sell used furniture."