From The Big House to Sold: How Estate Liquidators Simplify Downsizing and Home Sales"

Navigating the emotional and logistical maze of downsizing is a daunting process. Discover the secrets to a seamless transition as we chat with Jeff Marks from Seattle Magpies. Jeff walks us through the entire process, from figuring out what to keep and what to sell, to managing the emotional toll of parting with cherished possessions. You'll hear touching stories, like Neil's journey to a retirement home, offering a heartfelt look into the challenges and rewards of downsizing.

Facing a hoarder house situation? Jeff shares invaluable insights on setting realistic expectations and the immense effort required to tackle such homes. With a compelling case study of Bruce, we delve into the tough decisions and strict guidelines necessary to bring order to chaos. Learn practical advice for those who must live through the liquidation process and why it's often best for homeowners to step back during their own estate sales.

Curious about the ins and outs of estate sales? Jeff breaks down how to identify valuable items that can turn a profit and the various alternative options when a full estate sale isn't feasible. From pop-up and private sales to wholesale buyouts, you'll get a comprehensive look at how to manage unsellable items and why donations are often the preferred route. We also touch on the compensation structure for such services and underscore the importance of choosing the right estate sale company to ensure a smooth, efficient process.

Transcript

Dennis Day: 0:00

Hi everyone. This is Getting your Edge how to Right-Size your Home and Life podcast. I am your co-host, dennis Day, and I'm here today with my co-host, judy Gratton. Can you say hello, judy?

Judy Gratton: 0:13

I can say hello Dennis, hello Dennis, hello everybody.

Dennis Day: 0:17

Today we are here with Jeff Marks of Seattle Magpies and he's going to talk to us about his business that helps people before they sell their home, whether you're downsizing or not just selling. So let's introduce Jeff Marks from Seattle Magpies. Tell us a little bit about you and your business, jeff.

Jeff Marksz: 0:38

Yeah, as you said, we're Seattle Magpies and we're what we call a full service liquidator. When someone's getting ready to sell their house, they'll call somebody like us, because the house has to be emptied to get it ready to sell. So we help manage that entire process, whether it's help pack it up and get it moved out of the house or sell the contents to try and raise some money, and at the end just to empty the house and hand it over to the realtor to get it ready to sell, as there's a lot of steps involved after that point as well. We're just the very tip of that whole selling process.

Judy Gratton: 1:13

So when you're talking about the process, can you give an idea of how that works? At what point do they reach out to you before they put the home on the market, or how does that look?

Jeff Marksz: 1:23

We enter the process at a lot of different stages. Some people are just thinking about downsizing. Some people are like my realtor wants the house on the market next week because we'll miss the selling window. But generally we're going to enter at whatever point is needed and take people through the process. The first step for anyone looking to downsize is deciding what they want to keep and what they don't want to keep. They've got to go through their possessions and decide what they want to take with them to their new life, wherever they're going whether it's downsizing from a big house, empty nest, to a small condo or a retirement community or moving overseas and how are they going to move it and transition it to the new space.

Jeff Marksz: 2:03

Once everything's out of the house, you can look at the next step, which is selling. What do you do with what's left? Is it saleable? If so, how? At the end of the process, you never sell everything. There's always stuff left over. We need to empty the house and get it ready to hand over to the realtor and manage that transition. So there's a lot of steps to the process and there's a lot of variations within that process. A lot of people think of liquidation as like an estate sale is probably the thing that people engage with the most, but there's actually a lot more ways to skin the cat. When you actually look at a client's needs whether they need to move quickly or whether they have, say, outstanding debts and they really need to raise money, or there's just lots of mitigating factors to come up with the best way to help people move on.

Judy Gratton: 2:46

You've mentioned before the fact that people can get quite emotional and we have experienced that as realtors. That there's a lot of emotion in people downsizing and particularly their home is their story. How do you deal with that? How do you help them to transition through the emotional part of that?

Jeff Marksz: 3:09

We don't always enter at that point. Sometimes people have already left the house and we're just picking up the selling. There are a lot of instances where we are working closely with the clients to do that sorting process. A couple of summers ago we worked with a client, neil, really nice guy, 92 years old, still playing tennis. His wife died. He lived in the big house all by himself and it was dusty, he couldn't keep up with it and so he wanted to move to a retirement home. He needed help. So we went in and worked with them through the entire process where you know we literally he'd found a one bedroom retirement place so we had to downsize dramatically. So we literally went through room by room, drawer by drawer, and talk to him about okay, so in your new place, what do you need, what do you want? And it was. It's a touching process because as you go through that you'll often get stories. I won that tennis award at the such and such open just listening to them talk. One of the first things you do to try and let that out is they have a story to tell. It has meaning to them and letting them know that they're heard is a big part of that detachment, but at the end of the day it is about letting go.

Jeff Marksz: 4:17

Some people do get stuck on things like family photos. People have got boxes and boxes and boxes of family photos. They've literally been in the top shelf of the closet for 15 years and they haven't looked at it once and they're like oh, we need all our family photos. You have to talk them through it and say those are important parts of your family. Maybe somebody else in the family wants them because you don't necessarily have room for all those boxes of photos. Let's talk about how many photos you want to display in your new place. Can we get some frames and let's pick out the ones you're actually going to look at and make sure we have them in a place where you can look at them. The other ones you haven't looked at in 15 years so they're not as relevant anymore, and suggest that they focus on how it's going to apply into their new life, not their old life.

Jeff Marksz: 5:03

We had a client who was really into cooking and she was going into a retirement community that had a full service kitchen and cooking food service, but she really loved to cook. We're trying to work with her and she's got an extensive amount of cookware. We're like how much of this do you need in your new galley kitchen from your big gourmet kitchen? She wanted a lot of it. It was funny because we met up with her, I don't know, six or eight months after, just for lunch to see how it was going at the place. So how's your cooking going?

Judy Gratton: 5:29

You stay in touch with the people that you work with from time to time.

Jeff Marksz: 5:37

Oh yeah, quite often being an estate liquidator, it's a relationship. There's a lot of trust involved. You're literally handing over the keys to your castle when you invite us in to deal with all of your stuff and do it in a very sensitive way, both in terms of being respectful of it and honoring their privacy. Yeah, we do quite often make friends and still stay in touch with quite a few of them.

Judy Gratton: 5:53

I think it's so important for people to consider a service like yours because we've had situations where people are depending on their family. It doesn't always go well because the children just want you to get moved. That ability to share the stories and take time with the items before they let go of them is sometimes overlooked. It can cause issues between family members which otherwise wouldn't be there. You wouldn't be having a problem if it wasn't for that.

Jeff Marksz: 6:26

Sometimes it's even just having a third party do it. We haven't worked with these people yet, but they called us in because the house was an estate, it was a hoarder place and the parents are out and the children are trying to. They've got powers of attorney. They're trying to move them on, but my mom won't listen to me. She'll listen to my brother, but he lives in Spokane and all the family politics and drama just start coming out. Someone who can stand aside and be the referee or help go through that, or even situations where there's maybe some contention like different people want different things. Sometimes we do things like what we call family days. If the family can't decide who gets what, for example, do it equitably. We basically come in and price everything and they come in and get first pick so that when they're cashing out they know they're equitably splitting things up.

Judy Gratton: 7:15

Cool, that's a good idea. I hadn't thought about that. That's really a good idea. So, in terms of the value of things, I was very lucky that Jeff shared some knowledge with me a while back. I reached out to him trying to get rid of things like China and crystal silver, and it's a rude awakening to discover that the things you think are worth a lot of money are not necessarily worth a lot of money.

Judy Gratton: 7:39

Do you encourage people to look for things that are valuable? What am I going to take? What am I going to take? When am I going to leave? How do you address that? Because a lot of people including me, but my mother-in-law is a good example had a white sheer beaver fur coat and she wanted. When she passed, everybody felt that we could get a lot of money for that white sheer beaver fur coat and I'm like, no, it's not gonna happen. And it went from grandchild to grandchild, finally ended up with my daughter and she's what do I do with this thing? I don't want it and I'm like at this point it's been around for a couple of more years. Probably donate, it is the best that you could hope for, if anybody would even want it there. How do you deal with addressing a sense of value over some of these things that are not valuable anymore?

Jeff Marksz: 8:31

First of all, it's important to point out certain things Like, for example, you can't actually sell beaver fur it's illegal, so there's not a lot of value or that taxidermy big cat that your uncle brought back from Africa illegal to sell Bear claws. You can sell a taxidermy bear, but you can't sell the claws. Most forms of ivory.

Judy Gratton: 8:49

Ivory, but I didn't even think about estate sales.

Jeff Marksz: 8:53

Yeah, but when it comes to valuing, people are like oh, this stuff has value, but you have to be able to sell it to get value out of it. We worked on an estate for a locksmith and the sale of a lot of locksmithing equipment is regulated. You're not allowed to sell it because it's considered criminal accessory tools. If I give somebody a way to pick a lock and they happen to be a crook, then that's my liability and your liability. To your point about what's valuable and what's not valuable. People have different perceptions of value. Start with trying to get people in a different frame of mind. When it comes to liquidation, it's not about the value of the stuff, it's what you need in your new life, because once you have what you want by subtraction, what's left is irrelevant and in fact, we often talk in terms of assets and liabilities. You might have these big antiques and you think they're valuable, but trying to get the value out of them is going to add eight weeks to the selling process of the house and you're losing money, so they're actually a liability. As far as categories of things, you're absolutely right.

Jeff Marksz: 9:51

People used to collect antiques that used to be really valuable. People, particularly in the Pacific Northwest aren't into antiques and they're very hard to sell. Grandma's China, which people love. Think of the people who are buying things these days and furnishing their homes Millennials and Gen Z. They have small apartments. They have fast lives. If it doesn't go in the dishwasher, they don't want it. Lots of people are moving on and getting rid of it. The market's flooded with it. Nobody wants it, whereas other things do have value, things that people collect that you might not anticipate. For example, vintage Pyrex is highly collectible, that you might not anticipate.

Judy Gratton: 10:24

For example, vintage Pyrex is highly collectible.

Jeff Marksz: 10:26

That just blows your mind. People are like, oh, that old Pyrex that happens to be the limited edition Spirograph with its Bakelite underplate, which is worth. We had a sale where we had that and they're like, oh, that's just the Pyrex. No, that's the Spirograph with the rare underplate. And we got calls from all over the country from people who wanted that thing. I think we sold it for 600 bucks or something like that.

Judy Gratton: 10:45

Oh my gosh.

Jeff Marksz: 10:46

Or other collectibles like Hot Wheels. Oh, those are my little Hot Wheels. No, that happens to be the first set of Hot Wheels they ever made in its original case. We got calls from all over the country for them. We sold 18 Hot Wheels in their case for 3,000 bucks.

Judy Gratton: 11:00

You have to know these things.

Jeff Marksz: 11:02

There's a lot that goes into liquidation and that's the difference between kind of a professional liquidator and someone trying to do it themselves. People are often like we work on commission and it's a fairly high commission. We put a lot of work into it and bring a lot of knowledge to the table. So people are like I can do it myself and you can. You're probably A you've got to put the work in to do it. You're potentially leaving a lot of money on the table by either not knowing what something's worth, they price their antiques really high, not knowing that they don't sell, and they either don't sell anything because it's priced too high or they give it away because they don't know what it is. The liquidator's job is to extract the most value they can in the time that they're given.

Judy Gratton: 11:38

You mentioned hoarding and a lot of people, including myself. The older we get, the more we miss that minimalist stage. How long does this take for you if you're going through every drawer and helping people parse through decades of stuff?

Jeff Marksz: 11:55

What you're talking about when they're going through every drawer. There's three distinct services. We call that our pack and move service and that's an hourly service. So that's different than the selling service. And the answer is it takes as long as it takes or as much as they want to invest in that process.

Jeff Marksz: 12:09

That hoarder house that we were talking about, the family was like the mom wants to go through absolutely everything and I laid out for them the amount of days and hours it would take to do it.

Jeff Marksz: 12:20

And that particular case, for example, was an extreme hoarder. Like we literally have to do several dumpster runs before we can even move in the house. We laid out what that would cost to take her through it step-by-step and we're like it's a big number. And they're like, yeah, no, she's just going to have to say goodbye to it because that's just not practical or affordable. It's not that we're not good value for money, it's just a big ask. A house quicker than you think generally doesn't take more than a couple of days to go through it and make the big decisions. There's plenty of revisions and going back and working through stuff, but we try and get clients in the right headspace before we start, because the more they can do in advance to get their head around what they need and want, the easier the process goes when you work with them to sort through things.

Dennis Day: 13:05

So what are the common mistakes people make when they are separating and sorting?

Jeff Marksz: 13:10

I think it depends on what. First of all, there's no mistakes you can really make because, again, if you're focusing on what you need and want, the biggest mistake you can make is trying to take too much and you're making sure that, as you are going through it, that you have a need or want for it or a use for it. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's the Marie Kondo, does, it bring me joy? Minimalist type of thing, but it's got to at least have a use.

Jeff Marksz: 13:35

We had one client, bruce, a lovely guy. He was getting on, he had health problems but, amazing guy, he was going to sell his house, buy a house for a son, go live with his son to live out his days and all that sort of stuff. But he'll be effectively be living in a mother-in-law suite from his house. And he was an extreme hoarder. And we're going through this process of what do you want, what don't you want, and when I say hoarder, again hard to move around. And we go in the backyard and there's this tarp and there's all this stuff under the tarp and we said, bruce, what's this? We whipped the tarp off and it's full of diesel fuel, water tools and things like that oh, that's my Y2K emergency stash. I was like, okay, bruce, what of this do we actually need? There was a brand new in the box, reciprocating miter saw from Harbor Freight, which was like and Bruce, oh, I need that. That was a good deal, that's a great saw. I need that, yeah. Finally I turned to Bruce and I said what are you going to cut in the next 20 years that you haven't cut in the previous 20 years that it's been under this tarp? It was an eye-opener for him. Oh, my God, you're right, I'm holding on to all this stuff. I got to focus on what I need and where I'm going to be and what I'm going to do.

Jeff Marksz: 14:41

So the first thing is to be really strict with yourself about what you want and what you need. If you're going to hire a liquidator, let the liquidator do their job. Liquidation is a service and you often hear people say, oh, I went ahead and I did a bunch of donation runs First. It just makes any liquidator's heart stop because you're like oh, what did you do? Oh, grandma's old clothes. Oh, you mean the funky vintage ones that all the hip kids want. My old toolbox, oh, you mean those Hot Wheels, red lines that I sell for thousands. You don't know what's valuable or could be valuable and isn't valuable. There's enough stress in trying to manage your move anyway. Let the liquidator serve you. It's a service. Focus on you, focus on your transition, focus on packing, picking what you want and leave the rest behind and hand the keys over is the best advice to not.

Judy Gratton: 15:26

Now, do you deal with people who are still living in the home as they're going through this, or are they out by the time you come into the picture?

Jeff Marksz: 15:50

they're moving, how much time they have to move, and some people don't have the choice. They have to sell their house before they get a new house, for example. It's not ideal, but you can make it work With liquidation. It's a very chaotic process because if you're doing an estate sale that's happening in someone's house, you're inviting strangers in, so you can't have stuff intermingled and mixed together. You really need to create a clear space if you want to extract any value out of things. So if somebody does need to live in the home while we're working there, we do suggest that they effectively pack up and sequester everything. We're like okay, all your stuff goes in the back bedroom and we'll lock the door so that there's absolutely no mistake about what is to be sold or taken away and what isn't to be sold. People often ask should I attend my own estate sale? We don't prohibit it, but we recommend against it because it's not comfortable for the person and it's not comfortable for the buyers either. It's just not recommended.

Judy Gratton: 16:39

When you're selling the house, it's not a good idea for the owner to be there.

Jeff Marksz: 16:43

But again, we're practical. The job has to be done. If they have to live there, we make it work. They have to be ready to make those compromises. For example, sometimes we'll get a pod and we'll have them parking out front. We'll put all their stuff in a pod and it gets taken away to the storage facility. They live out of a suitcase for a couple of weeks or as long as it takes. There's lots of ways that we can make it work, but the best situation is if you can vacate yourself from the property. That's the best for everybody.

Judy Gratton: 17:10

I think what I'd like to cover next is a bit about okay, now you've done the sale, and now comes the part of whether or not you are going to donate the things. How do you deal with their donations? I think, now we've done the sale, there are still things left over and I believe from our previous conversation you mentioned that you'd help them donate things to places they want them to go.

Jeff Marksz: 17:40

It might be worth touching on the point about sale viability, because it's a point that people often miss. People think, oh, I've got stuff, I can sell it. It's not always the way you do it. There is that threshold for there to even be any sort of selling to happen from a professional liquidator. We all have minimums because it's all on commission.

Dennis Day: 18:00

So Jeff tell, us what you do when the stuff in the home isn't as valuable as the owner thinks and it's really not sellable.

Jeff Marksz: 18:11

Yeah, and there are some situations where that's the case. Just to give you an example to do an estate sale, a professional company is going to spend with their crew maybe a week setting up and a weekend running the sale. When we work on commissions we have to cover those selling costs. So your breakeven point on most estate sales is a gross revenue of about $10,000. So your break-even point on most estate sales is a gross revenue of about $10,000. If you can look around at your stuff and think to yourself, is this going to raise $10,000? That's the break point.

Jeff Marksz: 18:39

We can tell pretty quickly whether the contents of a home are viable for an estate sale. Normally, some clues are we start by looking for what we call the long poles or the anchor items. Clues are we start by looking for what we call the long poles or the anchor items. Is there a set of sterling silver, you know? Or is there expensive jewelry or a vehicle that we can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars? Because if you're trying to get to $10,000, it's a long way, doing it five or $10 at a time.

Jeff Marksz: 19:05

Just because it doesn't mean that household items aren't valuable, it just means that the help of a professional seller isn't covered by the value of what they are, and that doesn't mean that we can't extract value from it.

Jeff Marksz: 19:19

We talked before about the contents of a house sometimes being a liability versus an asset. If you can't easily sell them because it's either not valuable enough or it's not the type of value that can sell locally, then you've got to start looking at other liquidation options. Sometimes we do things that we call a pop-up sale, which is more like a managed garage sale. It's much less labor for us, but it allows us to generate some revenue. Sometimes there's a few valuable things, like a vehicle. We could sell that privately and try and raise some money that way. Or sometimes maybe it's a small collection and we can do what we call a buyout with wholesale pricing and get on with the sale of the property when a full estate experience isn't viable. You're looking at different options and again it's our job to try and figure out is there value and how can we unlock it? And it's not always an estate sale and you explain that bio you mentioned.

Jeff Marksz: 20:16

I saw it on your website and I'm not sure what that is yeah, for example, let's take the sterling silver set, which has a good value. They typically sell for a thousand bucks or whatever. But there's just not nothing else in the house. It's pretty bare and you're like, okay, I can't run an estate sale, but this silver has values. We'll be like, okay, we can effectively buy that from you at a fair wholesale price which leaves a profit for us but also allows you to move it quickly. Then we can move on.

Jeff Marksz: 20:41

It's usually as part of the next phase of the process which we'll talk about, which is the clear out, where you're clearing the house out. Because the house out? Because when we talk about the contents of the home as a liability rather than an asset, what we're trying to do is decrease that liability. Part of that liability is the cost of removing it from the house. When you're at that stage, it's not really about raising money, it's about how do you decrease that liability, decrease the cost of donating or trashing it.

Jeff Marksz: 21:08

And again, one way is wholesale, wholesale. We have other methods of selling that aren't estate sales. We sell online, we have private clients and things like that, but there's a small collection of hot wheels or whatever. We're like, okay, that's something we know we can sell online, so we work out this is what we can sell it for, this is our margin, and we say this is how much we can offer. It's a wholesale price. Our goal is to try and get those costs down when it comes to the removals, to offset the cost of actually clearing the house. That's how a buyout works.

Dennis Day: 21:39

I'm really disappointed. I didn't keep my Hot Wheels. I was right at the cusp right when they started with the orange track the whole bit. Every time a new one came out we were just wild about it. But yeah, you can't pack around for 60 years. So, in your experience, what kinds of things are valuable? Is there furniture, artwork, jewelry? What tends to bring the most value?

Jeff Marksz: 22:04

Interesting question, A tricky question, because within every category there is something that's valuable. I'd say one of the principles about understanding what's valuable is, if it was expensive when it was new, it has a chance of being expensive when it's old. Grandma's china is very nice quality, but she bought it at the department store and it was department store china then, department store china now, so it's not rare or particularly collectible as a category. China is not a great thing to sell, but if it's Wedgwood Queensware, there's a huge following for it and it's very collectible. We had a sale where we had a complete set of that and we literally had people. The house had a central courtyard. It was a lovely mid-century architecture house and you can either go left or right. The kitchen was in the back and we had all these people signed up on the list. They wanted the Queensware and they came in the house. Some of the people who wanted the Queensware went left and right and they both met in the middle at the same time and they're both grabbing it. It's just finally had to say okay, wait a minute, who was first on the list and who gets it?

Jeff Marksz: 23:06

There are certain categories that can be more valuable, for example, when it comes to furniture. I mentioned antiques not being particularly valuable but in this particular market in the Pacific Northwest, mid-century modern furniture does very well, just good quality, like full grain leather, chesterfield. If it was really expensive or special when it's new it has a chance of being valuable when it's old. Other thing that sells well in this area again, we talked about toys, vintage video games very hot market people looking for those old Nintendo games and things like that. I'm just trying to rattle these things off the top of my head. We talked about Pyrex, other Kitchenalia there's a lot of vintage electronics and Hi-Fi is very collectible. Other kitchen alia there's a lot of vintage electronics and hi-fi is very collectible.

Jeff Marksz: 23:53

Albums, albums and now not all albums. Again within the category there are certain albums that most albums are worth five bucks. We had a record collection. We went through it and you'll look for the usual suspects, beatles and elvis and things like that, and we found a beatles album within this category.

Jeff Marksz: 24:08

It's called the butchercher Cover. When they released the album it showed a picture of the Beatles in white butcher's coats with chopped up dolls all over the cover. That proved too much to the market but they'd already printed and released them. So they recalled all the albums. In the UK they destroyed all the covers, but in the US, rather than destroy them, they just put a sticker over the Butcher cover. So if you have the original album that never had a sticker on it, because you bought it when it first came out, or you had a promo version, particularly with the letter, then that's worth mega, mega money. But a lot of people, when they got the sticker version, they knew to take the sticker off right away and it caused a little bit of damage but you could steam it off and anyway, there's various grades of this butcher cover and I think we sold that album for about 1200 bucks.

Jeff Marksz: 24:57

There are categories of things to look for, but the main thing is knowing the thing that is valuable and collectible. The best of each category is what you're looking for. Things like Pianos are the best example of liability versus an asset. Even if you gave it away for free, the person is going to be spending $300 moving it and $100 tuning it, and these instruments just aren't worth that much money. You can get a good digital piano that takes up less space for practicing.

Judy Gratton: 25:23

I've seen free baby grand pianos. I have hauled pianos to the dump in homes that I've sold because nobody would take it.

Jeff Marksz: 25:34

Yeah, and it is a shame. Again, it's one of the other things about being a liquidator, though. We often say I got a guy, a piano guy. He can tell me whether the piano has instrument value. Some cheaper brand pianos or older pianos that weren't actually that expensive to begin with and they're just worthless. But there's other. Obviously, like a Steinway, is always going to have value. It's worth restoring, it's worth whatever. Yamaha is a very good brand. It has musical credibility, so there's a market for it. I call my guy, tell him what I got and he tells me whether that's an instrument or whether it's a paperweight and we deal with it appropriately.

Judy Gratton: 26:14

What do you love most about your job?

Jeff Marksz: 26:21

It's an interesting job. One of the coolest things about the job is we're learning new stuff all the time and it's very stimulating. I often tell clients jokingly that I know more about Barbie clothes than any adult male has any right to know, because I had to research them and I sold one Barbie outfit for $500. You just learn these things through experience. But I think the best thing about it is just our ability to help people. We get so many people who are so appreciative of what we do. We talked about how we form a relationship with the people we work with and we get notes and letters and gifts like I couldn't have done it without you.

Jeff Marksz: 26:50

It was such a stressful time in my life dealing with grief or change or whatever, and they're out of state and under stress. They're so appreciative that someone can come in hand the keys over and just know it's going to happen and it does happen and I don't know what I would have done if I didn't have his help. And that's the thing that makes you come back and deal with the rat poop and the dust in the hoarder houses and the messes, because if you're not doing it, this family is going to be in a bad situation and you're really helping them. That's what brings you in and makes you go the extra mile, knowing that they really need your help. Jeff.

Dennis Day: 27:25

I'm wondering what you do with things you mentioned being illegal to sell, like the fur coat, the beaver fur coat or maybe a stuffed cheetah from Africa. What do you do with these things that you can't sell?

Jeff Marksz: 27:40

Again, it varies. Obviously, the best thing is if somebody in the family does want it or has a use for it. You can't sell ivory, but you can inherit ivory, for example.

Judy Gratton: 27:50

Donate it to a museum or something like that Exactly.

Jeff Marksz: 27:54

We talk with Fish and Wildlife about these things and they recommend places where we can donate them Museums, universities. There's a big cat conservation charity who's allowed to take them. There are places like that, ivory. Similarly, you can donate it to those places or it ultimately gets destroyed, rightly because it is a problem. Beaver fur we do the right thing. We take it out of circulation and sometimes that means destroying it. But if we can find a home for it, we certainly do, whether it's with the family or with an institution, what is the coolest, funnest, most memorable thing you've found.

Jeff Marksz: 28:29

We get that question a lot. You sell so many things. It blurs together. But we certainly love selling cool things like vintage cars. We sold a 69 Charger, once Dodge Charger. It got a huge amount of interest and made lots of money. We love our jewelry, finding some great big diamonds and learning about them and getting them graded In terms of cool stuff.

Jeff Marksz: 28:50

I like industrial stuff. We liquidated a guy big diamonds and learning about them and getting them graded in terms of cool stuff. I like industrial stuff. We liquidated a guy who was a. He was basically a forensic analysis, so we were literally think abby and csi, so like he had a mass spectrometer and microscopes and samples to compare things to and it was like really fun because, hey, we have to learn it and we're reaching out to people all over the country. It's a very narrow market so we're making connections and learning about all that interesting stuff.

Jeff Marksz: 29:16

So many unusual things. A lot of metal workers in this region so we get lots of blacksmithing, cool specialty tools and big industrial things. People get excited about all sorts of stuff, but the more obscure the better. For me, one of my particular areas is vintage hi-fi and electronics. I love finding that rare clip corner horn that if people want want to collect or the pioneer stack from the from the seventies, that's got the original everything equalizer and the reel to reel tape, the whole nine yards. I love my vintage electronics, my obscure industrial things.

Judy Gratton: 29:52

Very good.

Dennis Day: 29:53

Jeff, tell us, how are you compensated for all this time and hard work? Good question.

Jeff Marksz: 29:59

We talked about the different services we have. There's packing and moving, the selling process and the clearing out process. For packing and moving it's an hourly charge, typically about $75 an hour. There's other things that we do in that service. For example, sometimes people need an inventory for probate and again by the hour we'll come in. We also we aren't certified appraisers ourselves, but we do have appraisers who we bring in. Appraisers generally cost around $150 an hour. A lot of that upfront work. People charge by the hour. It's a service. But when it comes to estate sales and working on commission, most companies charge a similar rate, about 40% of the gross. Some companies charge a little more, a little less, depending on the situation.

Jeff Marksz: 30:45

The amount of effort doesn't really change and the main thing is finding someone you feel you can partner with when selecting an estate sale company. It's not something you price shop on. It's about who's going to service you the best. So, yeah, 40%, and that's why there's a minimum amount. A lot of companies have that in their contract and we're very straight with people. The whole process starts with a free consultation. We'll come in, look at the property and we can tell you whether it's viable. If it doesn't, we'll tell you it's not something we can help with because it won't cover our costs. But here's some things you can do, and we're not shy of even telling people. You'll probably be better off if you did it yourself. This sells best on Craigslist. If you know how to do that, great. That's why I'd suggest you try and sell. It's on the commission and it's generally around the 40% mark.

Judy Gratton: 31:34

The clear out.

Jeff Marksz: 31:35

So the clear out once the selling process is done. Even if you have enough contents to run an estate sale, you never sell everything. You probably are only selling half of the contents of the house. It is possible to literally sell everything in the house. If you price everything at a dollar, you could empty the house. But that to literally sell everything in the house, if you price everything at a dollar, you could empty the house. But that's not the job of a liquidator. The job of the liquidator is to extract the most value in the time that you have. If you can sell half of the house at a premium, you're going to make more money than if you empty the house. Selling everything at a dollar, right, but you still need to empty the house at the end.

Jeff Marksz: 32:07

We do offer that service. Not a lot of estate companies do and there are other people that provide the service, from Got Junk to other clear out companies. But when you're working with those companies it's literally going to the dump in a dump truck and dumped out the back. Our philosophy as people who are working with families with needs is about donating and After the sale's done, if you engage us to do the clear out, we'll come in with the crew. We'll literally pack all the donations, things that are donatable. It's interesting.

Jeff Marksz: 32:40

Even knowing what's donatable is a skill, because donation places are very picky about what they'll take. We pack it all up. We basically then load a truck, we do a donation run and everything that we haven't packed for donation is trash. Then we load the rest on the truck and take it to the dump. Our goal at that point is if it isn't attached to the wall, it's gone. When getting a house ready for sale, the realtors want you know so that they can come in and do the repairs paint cleaning, staging etc. So that's what we do, and the whole process takes about two days. The cost to clear out a typical non-hoarder house it's about $2,000 plus whatever the trash bill is is what people can expect, and so that's a crew working for two days plus the truck.

Dennis Day: 33:26

Can you handle old fertilizer, paint oil, insecticides?

Jeff Marksz: 33:31

A great question because the answer is yes and no. As a company and as an individual, I'm not licensed to carry hazardous wastes. So if I put those things on my truck and I drive away and I get pulled over and they find that I'm transporting hazardous wastes as a company without a license, I get in big trouble. However, we do have licensed hazmat people to take care of those things. Interestingly, as a rule, what's considered a hazmat and what isn't can be a blurry line. There are some things that you wouldn't think twice about, like bleach, but it's actually considered a hazardous material for a company to transport at certain volumes. So we generally say that we don't transport liquids because instead of trying to parse what's toxic and what's not toxic, we put all the paint and liquids in a box in the garage. If we can dump it down the drain like vinegar, we empty as much as we can.

Jeff Marksz: 34:22

If we have a question. We leave the liquids and if you'd like us to contact our hazmat guy, we do it and it's not that expensive, our hazmat guy it's about 200 bucks to do a hazmat run and we dispose of it properly. Latex paint has to be dried out, which takes forever, or you take it to certain locations. You can only drop off so many gallons at a time. In our area there are hazardous waste facilities where you can take fertilizer and things up to certain quantities, usually at the transfer stations a couple of the transfer stations of hazmat areas and we do that.

Jeff Marksz: 34:54

We had a client just recently who went into his garage and there were five 50-gallon drums of diesel fuel that had been there for 30 years. How do you deal with that? We did find a company who can take 50-gallon drums or the alternative was to get a barrel pump and decant it into five gallon barrels because you could only drop it off in certain amounts at a time and basically decant it and take it to hazmat in stages. You're absolutely right, because a lot of these old houses you find those old linoleum style tiles that are actually full of asbestos and you'd have to handle them really carefully, just like everything else in the estate business, your knowledge is really important about what you can and can't do or shouldn't do. Thank, you?

Judy Gratton: 35:40

That's amazing. Was that your same guy that was saving up all the stuff for Y2K?

Dennis Day: 35:46

No different guy. Jeff, if we were looking for Seattle Magpies, what would we do to find you and where we have?

Jeff Marksz: 35:54

a website, wwwseattlemagpiescom. We're on Facebook, we're on email seattlemagpies at gmailcom, and we're happy to take calls. We answer our phone pretty much all the time 206-272-0371.

Dennis Day: 36:11

All your weekends are taken with estate sales right now. If I wanted to do one, am I going to wait six weeks, 10 weeks? Where am I at. Yeah absolutely.

Jeff Marksz: 36:20

We're typically. First of all, if you want to engage us, we can come out and do a consultation pretty quickly during the week. But, as you rightly say, the weekends book up pretty quickly and us and pretty much all the other credible companies that are out there and there's some great liquidators in the Seattle area we all know each other, we all help each other, but most of us are booking four to six weeks out. So if you're looking to sell things, expect a delay of four to six weeks, Because if we're not doing an estate sale, we might be doing a move, we might be doing a clear out. We are pretty our weekends fill very quickly.

Jeff Marksz: 36:54

You'll find that we get calls all the time where people are like I need to do a sale. I've got lots of great stuff. Oh, that's great, I love to hear it, but it needs to be next weekend. We're like sorry, we can clear it out for you. We can maybe do a bit of a buyout. It's about trading time for money If you're trying to get out on the market before the August summer vacations. Sometimes you just got to make a decision. But yeah, to your point, Dennis, expect a four to six week window for booking most estate sale companies.

Dennis Day: 37:24

This has been great, Jeff. I really appreciate your time. We'll get your information on the audio and video.

Judy Gratton: 37:33

Printed on there as well.

Dennis Day: 37:34

Any last words, anything we didn't discuss that you feel the need to information on the audio and video Printed on there as well. Any last words?

Jeff Marksz: 37:42

anything we didn't discuss, that you feel the need to let people know. No, there's so much that goes into estate liquidation. The best thing is to engage a company and get that advice, and we love to talk to people and help them out. Even if our advice at the end of the day is here's how you can do it yourself. The best thing is to get that conversation started as soon as possible. We're all here to help you and we hope we can.

Jeff Marksz: 38:01

Why Magpies? Good question. We have a lot of expertise. There's another part of our business that we didn't talk about. We have a big eBay business. We've got a warehouse. We ship thousands of packages a year all over the world and that really helps us tune in to what's valuable and what isn't valuable.

Jeff Marksz: 38:20

We have a pretty deep knowledge, not only because of what we sell at estate sales, but because we sell a lot of things through other channels as well. Clients give us a lot of feedback that we're very responsive and reliable. Our business is pretty much 100% referral. We generally work with people who know us and they keep calling us back because they know they can rely on us. When we say we'll get the job done, we get it done, which is particularly important when working with realtors, because you guys have scheduled the painters and you've scheduled the. There's a lot of dependencies that are involved in getting it done. Reliability is a big factor for us as well. We're fun to work with. We like people, we like helping people out. Hopefully, if there's a good chemistry, people will feel the same. Anything else, judy.

Judy Gratton: 39:06

I don't think so. I was just very impressed from the first time I talked to you, jeff. You were honest and supportive at the same time. I'm talking to you about my great aunt's china from Japan, and I was able to let go of it because it was like, why hold on to it? I gave it to a very dear friend who wanted it and it made me feel good.

Dennis Day: 39:25

Thank you, jeff, so much for taking the time to be with us, and we will have a fabulous guest the next time. If you are interested in contacting us about downsizing or any other real estate question, give us a call or go to our website at edgeroopteencom. Thanks for watching and listening. That's it. See you next time. Bye.

Judy Gratton: 39:51

Thank you JR, thank you Dennis.

Dennis Day: 39:53

Thank you guys.