Certain styles and trends dominate the home furnishing marketplace, and people who care about this kind thing might be drawn to the latest and best offered by brands like West Elm and CB2, but I’m here to tell you that you can ditch the over-priced hype in favor of something with far less cachet: online estate sales.
Chances are there are beautiful, timeless pieces of furniture being auctioned off, within a relatively close distance of where you live. If you play your cards right, you can make away with underpriced wares that you probably couldn’t have found anywhere else.
What are online estate sales?
They’re much like estate sales of the organic physical world, but online. Basically, when someone—like, say, a rich person with lots of expensive vintage furniture—passes on, whoever controls their former belongings sells them off in an auction.
A great parallel is eBay, which is the world’s eminent digital auction house, but there are other sites that can connect you to estate auctions all over the country, where gorgeous furnishings are lying in wait for you to pounce. One site I like is Auction Ninja, which connects users to estate sales via their city, state, and zip code. There’s others, such as Auction Zip, which function under the same framework. And others, like Estatesale.com, hold events under a certain timeframe and expect bidders to participate within the allotted window.
The crux of the idea here, though, is to nab something for laughably cheap, when it isn’t quite a given that you always will.
How to bid and get the furniture you want
The auctions start off seemingly miraculously, often with items priced at zero dollars. That changes as time passes by, of course, but if something floats under the radar for long enough, you might just make away with an excellent bargain.
Be discerning about what you want and how much you’re willing to spend. There’s usually a time limit placed on an item until bidding expires, so you have to be hawkish about the item and check in periodically as bids trickle in. You don’t even really have to bid to get a feel for how this works: Auction Ninja, for example, allows you to “watch” an item, which means you get pinged every time there’s a notable update on the sale. With the ping alerts, you can stand back and let others start the bidding war, only to spring on an item when the time is nigh for striking.
If you actually do win a bid, you’ll be notified of when and where to pick up your prize, and you can now officially fancy yourself an auction aficionado. Much of this hinges on the thrill of the chase: it’s not as easy as heading to your local upscale furniture purveyor and swiping your credit card, but there’s definitely something gratifying about winning a storied piece of furniture that will add character and charm to your home, at a steal of a price.