The time has come...
What's ‘collectibles’ - what can be sold? What's junk? What will fit in the ‘new place’? Who will move the stuff? Or take for donations? ‘Nostalgia pictures’ taken and emailed for ‘the kids’ to claim what they'd like... Researched adult communities. One company could do it all... Big market coming on line as boomers check out of large family homes.
Who will make a fortune with this?
That is a great idea. I have a few valuable things but it’s so much work to sell one at a time on eBay. I’ve been making an effort to cull stuff not to make my estate convenient for others but to create more space and rid myself of some distractions. We take nothing out of this life.
Auction companies do this already to some extent...albeit on the back end, after the person has died usually. That’s because horders don’t want help downsizing while alive.
I’ve been to a few auctions, and witnessed people buying crates of junk...always wondered if an estate auction was in their family’s future.
Too labor intensive. Have you ever seen that show called 'Hoarders'? Most people think their stuff is valuable while in most cases it is really just junk.
You can go to an estate scale every day of the week if you want to. And it’s a good way to buy furniture for a rental property or first apartment or something along those lines.
There really isn’t a great collectibles market for much of anything any longer. Every great collectibles bubble has come and burst at this point. And with Boomers starting to pass on, the markets are only going to be flooded with more stuff.
I don’t know if there is a fortune to be made here. My dad (70) has been in the process of downsizing things from my childhood home for a good five years now. It’s actually a hobby. Somehow, the house seems just as full as ever.
But I don’t know if people really truly want to do the “Let’s get rid of this stuff” before I die game.
I currently have three sets of inherited china. I stand to inherit at least 6 more in the next 20 years. I could open a five-star restaurant.
We’re actually using the china of one of my wife’s great aunts as our “every day” dishes. It made absolutely no sense to replace broken pieces of the dishes we got at Macy’s ten years ago when we could have a dinner party for 36 based on the stuff gathering dust in our attic.