Alicia was very professional, punctual, easy to work with, and fair. i highly recommend using her company to run an estate sale for you.
In April 2014, I'd initially contacted Alicia after finding her company on Angie's List. I based my decision to contact her on the fact that her reviews, although not many, were rated very highly. My brothers and I were looking for someone to organize, advertise, and run an estate sale to sell the contents of our late parents' house that we no longer wanted. We needed a professional such as Alicia to take responsibility for this task because we didn't live in the immediate area, and because of our work schedules, we only had free time on the weekends to work on the house. We didn't have enough free time to organize and hold the sale ourselves.
Alicia met with us in April within a week of our contacting her. She gave us a free consultation/estimate regarding if she'd thought we had enough items to hold a sale and if she thought that the sale would make enough money to make it worth her time and effort.
Alicia agreed to run the sale for us, believing that she would break even, and we possibly would make a small profit from the items. From that point forward, we verbally had to agree not to take anything our of the house (and therefore reduce the potential profits). We also had to agree not to interfere with the sale in any way, such as deciding that an item would not be sold for a low price in front of a potential buyer. Two of us family members came to the sale for moral support and to keep the buyers out of the rooms that they weren't supposed to venture into. Other than that, we let Alicia and her assistant run the sale and didn't interfere.
We decided to hold the sale in mid-July and gave Alicia only one to two weeks notice ahead of time. A week or so before the sale, Alicia came to the house to organize the items, tag them with prices, and take photos of about 30 or 40 items to highlight on her website. It seems as if there are regular estate-sale buyers who attend sales each weekend and follow the websites of people and businesses like Alicia's to know where the sales and good deals will be held next. Alicia and her assistant also spent much of the Friday before the Saturday sale to organize and price the items and put up signs on the road advertising the sale. Alicia made a deal with us that she would need to make a certain amount of money to pay her costs. Then she would ask for 25% of the profits above that break-even point, and we could keep the other 75%.
Near the end of the sale, Alicia also had a woman from a separate business but with whom she works come to the sale to meet us and give us a price to clean out the remaining contents of the house and broom-sweep the house.
The sale went very well. We reached the break-even point needed to pay Alicia and her assistant. In hindsight, we probably should have held the sale in the spring or in the fall, when fewer people are on summer vacations or at the beach. As it turned out, the weather on the day of the sale (Saturday) was warm and sunny, so fewer people than Alicia had imagined attended the sale because they probably were out enjoying the great summer weather. Maybe we also should have given Alicia more lead time to organize and advertise the sale, so we could have possibly attracted more buyers.
Although she didn't need to, Alicia felt badly that the sale wasn't as well attended as she'd hoped, so she gave us 100% of the profits above the break-even point, instead of taking 25% or them as we originally agreed to. We ended up hiring the woman who cleans out houses to finish working on the house. It cost significantly more than the profit we'd made from the sale, but my brothers and I felt it was worth it. The clean-out woman and her crew took out every item that we had wanted her to dispose of and left the personal items (photographs, news articles, etc.) that my brothers and i are still going through. The clean-out crew consolidated those items into one room. The clean-out crew then donates these items to a charity somewhere in central Pennsylvania, which then sells the items to make money for programs to help people with special needs who are served by the charity. The clean-out crew also cleaned out the basement, garage, and shed that contained items in them that are hard to disposed of in an environmentally safe manner, such as old appliances (large and small ones), motor oil, old paint cans, old lawn mowers, etc.
For an additional fee, we paid the clean-out crew to help get the house ready to be sold. They removed the picture hooks in the walls, filled the holes from the hooks, painted the walls a neutral color, and removed old wall-to-wall carpeting to reveal the hardwood flooring underneath. These steps were taken to neutralize the decor of the home and update it, so we can put the house on the market to sell it.
In summary, I'd definitely agree that we had a positive experience hiring Alicia and Pricelessfind, LLC. She made the difficult job of cleaning out the house that my parents had owned for 50 years that much easier. I would recommend her to anyone looking for someone to run an estate sale. Alicia also is qualified to appraise items, although we didn't hire her for appraisal services.