A New Revenue Channel for House Clearance Companies: Listing Sales on StickerSale

If you run a clearance company, you already know the question. You are halfway round the walkthrough, working out van loads and tip runs, and the client says it from the doorway: is any of this worth anything? Almost every job produces that sentence, and most firms have never had a good answer to it.

The honest answer is usually yes, and rather more than the client expects. The commercial problem is what you then do with it. Say no and you have shaded the truth to protect a quote. Say yes and offer to handle it, and you have volunteered for a resale operation you never set out to run. Point them at an auction house and the job stalls for a month while somebody comes to look, takes four things and declines the rest.

Listing the house as a contents sale gives you a fourth answer: yes, and here is how we sell it before we clear the rest.

What is actually on offer here

StickerSale is the marketplace where house contents sales are listed, marketed and ticketed. We do not run the sales ourselves. Professionals do, which is the point of this page. You bring the house and the client relationship, we bring the listing, the buyer audience, the timed entry ticketing and the system that runs the day.

So one job carries two pieces of revenue: the sale, then the clearance of whatever the sale did not take. You are already on site, you already have the client's trust, the vans and the labour. Nobody is better placed to run that sale than the firm that was going to empty the house anyway.

The case, in the terms you would actually assess it

There are four commercial arguments, in roughly the order they matter.

• You win jobs you are currently losing. When a family is choosing between three quotes, the firm that can sell the contents first is not being compared on price with the other two. It is answering a different question.
• You get paid twice on one address. One site visit, one client, one set of keys, two pieces of work.
• The clearance gets cheaper to deliver. A sale removes the heavy, bulky items that eat van space and disposal weight. What is left is the residue, which is the part your business is actually built to move.
• You stop writing off value you can see. Every experienced operator knows what leaves a house that should not have. Selling it properly, in the house, on a fixed date, closes that gap without you becoming a reseller.

The argument you make to the client is a separate one, already written up for them. Our guide to whether it is worth selling house contents before booking a clearance puts the case in the language a homeowner or executor understands, and it is a useful thing to send after a quoting visit, because it is an assessment rather than a sales page and it says plainly where selling first is not worth the effort.

Does this cannibalise your clearance work?

Any sensible operator asks this first, so let us take it head on.

It changes the job. It does not remove it. A sold-down house still has to be emptied, and in our view that clearance is the better piece of work. The volume is lower, so the day is shorter and the disposal bill is smaller. What is left is largely the unsaleable end, which means fewer decisions on site and fewer conversations about whether the client really wants to part with the dresser.

What you do lose is the part of your quote priced on volume. If you charge by van load or cubic yard, a sold-down house bills less than a full one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The question is whether the sale income, the shorter day, the lower tip fees and the job you would not otherwise have won add up to more than the volume you gave away. On most furnished houses they do. On a house with nothing in it worth a sticker they do not, and you should just clear it.

A sold-down house is still a house that needs emptying. The clearance still happens, it just happens on a lighter house, on a better margin, for a client who has already paid you once.

There is a second order effect worth naming. Firms that can only quote for removal compete purely on price, and the direction of travel on what a house clearance costs does not favour anybody trying to hold a margin. Offering something the price-only competitors cannot is the most direct way out of that race.

If that fits how your business already works, register as a professional partner and we will talk through your area, your capacity and the kind of houses you take on. Read on first if you want the operational detail.

Who does what

The split matters, because a wrong assumption here wastes everybody's time. We are a marketplace and a system, not a sale crew. The physical work stays with you.

The day by day version of the sale side, including floor staffing and how settlement back to the client works, is in running a house contents sale as a professional, written for repeat operators rather than a family doing it once. The client-facing version, worth reading so you know what your customer has been told, is our seller's checklist for preparing a house for a contents sale.

Which houses suit this, and which do not

We would rather you turned down the wrong ones than ran a thin sale and concluded the model does not work. The difference is usually obvious inside ten minutes of a walkthrough.

Deadline is the one that catches people out. A sale needs runway for the listing to be seen, so a client ringing on the Monday who needs keys back on the Friday is a clearance. Say so plainly and do the clearance well.

What happens to the things that do not sell

They come to you, which is what makes the model coherent rather than a nuisance. Sales run to a fixed end point, prices are reduced towards the close of the window, and whatever is still standing at the end is the clearance job you were always going to do. From the client's side this is explained in what happens to anything that does not sell, which sets the expectation before you arrive rather than after.

That handover is deliberate. A seller who knows the residue has somewhere to go commits to the sale far more readily, and a firm holding the back end of the job can afford to be generous about what goes into it.

If you are not a clearance company

The same channel is open to other operators who deal with full houses for a living. Auction houses in particular sit on a steady stream of material they cannot economically catalogue, and turning it away costs them client relationships they would rather keep. That case is written up separately in how auction houses can use StickerSale to reach buyers between sales. Probate specialists, valuers, removal firms and estate agents handling executor sales all touch the same moment, and the channel applies to them too.

Common questions

What does it cost to list a sale?

Set out in one place rather than negotiated job by job. See what listing a sale costs.

Do I need to change my insurance or licensing?

You are inviting the public into a property, which is a different risk from working in an empty house with your own crew, so check your public liability cover before the first sale rather than after it. Your waste carrier registration and existing clearance cover are unaffected.

Can I run sales in more than one town?

Yes. Sales are listed by location across the UK, so a firm covering Greater Manchester, one covering Bristol and one working across Glasgow all list into the same national buyer audience. Coverage is a matter of what you can physically service, not territory we hand out.

What if the client wants to keep some of it?

Normal and expected. Only stickered items are in the sale, rooms can be closed off entirely, and family pieces are put aside before pricing starts. Do that walk with the client before you sticker anything, because a sold item cannot be retrieved.

Will I be competing with the platform for the same clients?

No. We do not run sales, so no crew of ours turns up in your area. Enquiries arriving through the platform need a professional on the ground to deliver them, which is why this channel exists.

How do I explain the format to a client who has never heard of it?

Send them a link. Our plain explanation of what a house contents sale is and how it works covers the format, and the options comparison in selling house contents after probate suits an executor weighing everything up. Letting a client reach the decision themselves usually beats selling it to them on the doorstep.

Where to start

Look at a live listing first. Browse the sales currently listed and judge whether the buyers turning up to those would turn up to a house you are quoting on this month. Five minutes there beats any amount of explanation from us.

Then register as a professional partner. We will go through your coverage area, the volume you can realistically handle and how a first sale works, and you can put it in front of the next furnished house you quote for. The trade has spent years telling clients there is nothing in the house worth selling. There usually is, and you are the firm standing in the room.