How Auction Houses Can Use StickerSale to Reach Buyers Between Sales
Most of a house is not economic to catalogue, store and lot. Listing it as a contents sale keeps the client and fills the gap between catalogued sales.
Every valuer who has done a house call knows the shape of the visit. You go round the rooms, find eleven or twelve things worth entering, note a couple more that might group into a box lot, and look at the remaining nine tenths of the house knowing it will cost more to move and catalogue than it will ever realise. Then you have the conversation.
That conversation is the reason this page exists. Not because there is anything wrong with the auction model, but because declining nine tenths of a house is a commercially awkward thing to do to a client who came to you for help with all of it.
Why the saleroom cannot take most of a house
This is arithmetic, not a failing to be fixed. A lot has to be collected, transported, examined, described, photographed, stored, catalogued, staffed on the day, invoiced and collected again by the buyer. That handling cost is much the same whether the hammer falls at twenty pounds or two thousand, so below a certain figure the lot is a loss before it reaches the rostrum. Everyone in the trade knows roughly where that line sits for their own saleroom.
The line has also moved. General furniture, mid range dinner services, wardrobes, sofas, the ordinary contents of ordinary houses: a great deal of it has drifted below the threshold over the last twenty years, while the properties themselves have become more valuable and more executors need help with them. More houses arrive, and a smaller share of each is worth entering.
Meanwhile the material is not unsaleable. It is unsaleable through a catalogued lot, which is a different statement. A perfectly sound oak wardrobe that costs forty pounds to move and generates a fifteen pound hammer price is a bad lot and a good buy. Someone would happily pay for it, in the room it currently stands in, if they could walk in and carry it out themselves.
Most of a house is not unsaleable. It is unsaleable as a catalogued lot, because the handling costs more than the item is worth. Take away the handling and the arithmetic changes.
What declining the rest of the house actually costs you
Three things, and only one of them is obvious.
- The commission on material you could have sold. The smallest of the three, but it is not nothing across a year of house calls.
- The relationship. An executor who has been told you will take a dozen items and they should ring a clearance firm about the rest has been half helped. They will remember which part of the problem you solved and which part you handed back.
- The next instruction. Solicitors, probate practitioners and family members refer on the basis of how the whole job went, not how the twelve lots performed. A firm that can deal with the entire contents of a house is a different proposition to refer.
There is also the awkward middle case: the client who will not release the good pieces unless somebody takes the rest. That instruction is lost outright, often to a firm that skips the lot.
Where a contents sale fits
A house contents sale prices everything in the house with a sticker, opens the doors on a fixed date to buyers holding timed entry tickets, and lets them pay and carry things out on the spot. There is no transport, no storage, no cataloguing and no lotting, which is precisely why it works on material a saleroom cannot economically touch. We market the sale and run the ticketing, you handle the house.
It is not a replacement for what you do. It is the other half of the answer.
| Consideration | Catalogued auction lot | House contents sale |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Rare, signed, dated, provenanced, collectable | Volume, general furniture, household goods, tools, books |
| Price discovery | The room decides, and can exceed estimate | Set in advance on the sticker |
| Handling | Collection, storage, cataloguing, photography | None, the item never leaves the house |
| Buyer reach | National and international, including trade | Local and regional buyers who will travel and load |
| Timing | Tied to the sale calendar | A date you set around the house and the client |
| What it leaves behind | The unentered majority of the house | A largely empty house and a much smaller clearance |
Buyers themselves increasingly move between both formats, which is worth knowing when you consider where your regulars are spending their Saturdays. We set the two side by side for them in local auction houses versus house contents sales, and it is a comparison rather than a pitch: for anything genuinely collectable, the saleroom is where those buyers should be.
If your firm regularly turns away contents you would rather have kept hold of, you can register as a professional partner and list sales alongside your saleroom calendar. The detail below is worth reading first, particularly the part about what should still go to the rostrum.
The good pieces should still go to the saleroom
We will be blunt about this, because getting it wrong would damage both of us. A fixed sticker price on a piece with genuine rarity is a mistake. Competitive bidding is how an underestimated item finds its ceiling, and a specialist sale puts the right eleven collectors in the same room on the same afternoon. No contents sale does that.
So the sensible sequence is the one you would arrive at anyway. Enter what merits entering. List the balance of the house as a contents sale, with a date that sits after the pieces have gone. The client gets a saleroom result on the things that deserve one and a cleared house on the rest, from a single firm, without being handed a phone number and left to it.
Where the client is dealing with an estate, the fuller picture of their options, including where auction consignment is plainly the right route, is set out in selling house contents after probate. It is honest about what the saleroom does better, which makes it a reasonable thing to send an executor who is still deciding.
The calendar argument
Catalogued sales run to a rhythm, and between them sits idle capacity: valuers who are not valuing, porters who are not portering, and a mailing list hearing nothing from you for weeks. Nobody solves that by holding more auctions, because the cataloguing is the constraint rather than the appetite.
A contents sale takes very little of the capacity a catalogued sale eats. No cataloguing, no photography of individual lots, no condition reports, no storage. It is pricing labour and a staffed door, on a date you choose, in somebody else's house, which makes it unusually easy to slot into the quiet weeks and puts something in front of your buyer list in the meantime.
What the work actually involves
Less than you would assume, because most of what makes an auction laborious is absent. Someone prices the house, which takes a day or two and is the bulk of the effort. Someone shoots photographs and a walkthrough video. We list it, market it and issue the tickets. On the day you staff the door and the floor, take payment through the system, and buyers do their own lifting.
Your valuers are overqualified for the pricing part, which is an advantage rather than a waste. Knowing at a glance which of four wardrobes is worth three times the others is what makes a priced sale work, and it is what a general clearance operator finds hardest. The full operational picture is in running a house contents sale as a professional.
Clearance firms approach the same opportunity from the other direction, with the vans and the labour but without the eye. How the model reads to them is set out in the revenue channel for house clearance companies, and nothing stops a saleroom and a clearance firm splitting a house between them.
Common questions
Does this compete with our own general sale?
Only if you were already entering that material, and most firms enter less of it each year. If a general sale still absorbs house contents profitably, keep doing it. This is for what currently does not make it through the door.
What does listing a sale cost?
Published in one place rather than negotiated case by case. See what listing a sale costs.
Can we run a sale in a property we are also selling contents from at auction?
Yes, and it is the usual arrangement. Remove the entered lots first, then price and sticker what remains. Only stickered items are in the sale, so anything held back for a future catalogued sale is simply not priced.
What happens to whatever does not sell on the day?
Prices come down as the window closes, and the residue goes to a clearance, handled in house or passed to a clearance partner. Either way the house ends up empty, which is what the client wanted.
Do we need to tell clients this is not an auction?
Clearly and early, because the two get confused. No bidding, no reserve, no estimate: the sticker price is the price and the first person to reach it owns the item.
The straightforward version
You are already in the house, and you already know what everything is worth, which is the rarest skill in this business and the one a priced sale depends on entirely. What is missing is a format that does not require you to move nine tenths of a house into a saleroom to sell it. The client-facing version of that argument is is it worth selling house contents before you book a clearance, which is a useful thing to leave behind after a valuation visit.
When it suits you, register as a professional partner. We will look at your area, your sale calendar and the kind of houses you get called to, and you can try it on the next instruction where the good pieces come to you and the rest of the house has nowhere to go.
