Guides

Written to be useful before you hire anyone

Most of what is published about estate sales is written by companies trying to be hired, and it shows: it explains why you need help without explaining how the thing actually works. These are longer pieces on the decisions that come before that: what your options genuinely are, what each one returns, and what is different about doing this on Oʻahu.

If you read them and conclude that an on-site sale is not right for your estate, that is a good outcome. It is a considerably better one than finding out three weeks into a sale that should not have been booked.

What these cover

• Choosing a route. An on-site sale, an auction, consignment and an outright buyout return different amounts over different timeframes and suit genuinely different situations. Most families are only ever told about one of them.
• Condominium constraints. A large share of Oʻahu estates sit in buildings whose house rules decide what is possible: including, in some buildings, prohibiting a public sale entirely. That answer changes everything downstream of it, and it is worth having in week one.
• Sequence. Settling a parent's home has an order that works and several that waste months. The single most expensive mistake (clearing the house before anyone has looked) is also the most common and the only irreversible one.
• Preparation. Almost everything families do to get a house ready, whether cleaning, repairing, sorting or discarding, reduces what the sale returns. What genuinely helps beforehand is a short list, and most of it is paperwork rather than tidying.

They are written for the person doing the work, not for search engines. Where something is a legal or tax question, they say so and point you at the right professional rather than guessing.

If you only read one

It depends on where you are:

• Someone has died and you are not sure where to start: read settling a parent's home. The first two steps in it will save you more than the other two guides combined.
• The property is a condominium: read condo estate sales first, because the building's answer determines whether the other decisions are even available to you.
• You have been quoted by one company and want to sanity-check it: read the route comparison, then the pricing page, which lists the questions worth putting to any company including us.
• You are about to start clearing the house: stop, and read preparing a home for a sale first. It is the shortest of the four and the only one that can save you money in the next hour.

None of them require you to contact us to be useful, and none of them end in a sales pitch.