By Rachel Sugar
Marley Barzen, who is 30 and lives in Ottawa, did not set out to enter the estate-sale industry, but the thing about estate sales is that the industry finds you. “My background, professionally, was reselling ethical slow fashion,” she explains over Zoom, “and then I pivoted to doing fashion styling, but my niche was helping people downsize.”
And so, it really wasn’t all that crazy when, in the spring of 2024, a former styling client presented her with an opportunity. The client had inherited a condo from her late father and needed someone to deal with the contents; Barzen had just broken up with her then-partner and needed a place to live. “If I give you this place to stay,” the client asked her. “Can you help me?” And when her massage therapist gave Barzen’s name to an acquaintance who’d just inherited a 200-year-old farmhouse containing six generations’ worth of stuff, she could help them, too.
You may have heard: The estate-sale business is entering its “golden age.” Boomers are aging, and their parents are aging faster, and they all are leaving behind huge amounts of stuff nobody knows quite what to do with. “People used to keep their stuff,” said John Romani, who runs Sales by Helen on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Stuff was a symbol of stability. People amassed it and kept it and passed it on to their children, who would grow up to have a place to put it. But people don’t live like that anymore. “The baby boomers did a very good job of saying, ‘don’t love stuff, love experiences,” he told me. “Their kids like to be mobile. They don’t like to be burdened by a dining room set.” Even if they’d love a dining room set, where would it possibly go?
Selling a lifetime’s worth of belongings is daunting. The timeline is often short, and the stuff is infinite. Aaron Siepierski, owner of Aaron’s Estate Sales in metropolitan Detroit, reports that about half the time he meets with prospective clients, the appointment ends in tears. “They’re so relieved they’re not having to do it on their own,” he said. This is when his work begins.
It’s an intimate project. You are selling furniture, but also: clothes, art, linens, knicknacks, collectables, ephemera, books, office supplies, tools, sewing machines, jewelry, and kitchenware. You are selling the food still in the cabinets. You are selling needlepoint supplies and Christmas ornaments and exercise equipment and antiques and souvenirs and half-used bottles of detergent. You are, in a single go, selling all the trappings of a life. It can be an emotional process. Nobody liquidates a house because everything is going great. “There are three reasons why you have an estate sale,” said Romani. “Downsizing, death, and divorce.” Even if a client is realistic about prices, clear-eyed that their great-grandmother’s beloved China set is worth basically nothing and the silver flatware will end up melted down for scrap, even if no one’s died yet, there’s still the matter of the sorting. “There are certain items that tie you to your mom or dad or relative in this beautiful and special and singular way,” Barzen tells her clients. Everything else gets a price.
This is the magic of estate sales. Most things aren’t special, but anything could be.
Is this weird? On some level, yes. “I think historically, people have felt like peeping Toms,” she said. “They feel almost bad, buying from someone who has passed.” And so she tries to add a little distance, to make it feel less like breaking-and-entering and more like a curated museum about a stranger. But you only have to glance at EstateSales.net, the main listings hub for the industry, to see that this is not a universal approach.
Sales last for two or three or four days, in person, or online, or in some combination. Most companies are small and independent — in the Wild West of estate sales, anyone can hang a shingle — but bigger players are moving in. The value of any given sale varies wildly: there are estate sales that gross a few thousand, and sales that bring in half a million. The company generally takes something like 40 percent; the remainder goes to the client, in addition to (ideally) newfound freedom.
In keeping with the law of supply and demand, the best bargains are for the things nobody wants: most China sets. China cabinets. Grandfather clocks. (“Ten or 15 years ago, I sold clocks for $30, $40, $50,000 dollars,” Romani told me, but now “nobody wants them.”) Formal things. Heavy things. (A 23-year-old customer of Barzen’s snagged an oak secretary desk for $500 because it was 800 pounds; she’d cajoled her roommates.) Dated-but-not-vintage furniture. (Hopeless.)
Here, in the middle of 2026, is what tends to sell: brass. (“A TikTok trend,” said Siepierski. “Five years ago, nobody wanted brass anything.”) Midcentury modern furniture. Jewelry, both fine and costume. Collections. Sports ephemera. Vintage toys (Hot Wheels, Barbie). Antique blue-and-white China (a current exception to the rule.) “Artwork, rugs, silver, gold, and jewelry pay the bills,” said Romani, who often sells the most valuable stuff through the company’s online store. “Everything else is filler.” There are items that are hot commodities in some parts of the country, and overlooked in others, observed Joel Bragen, a former software consultant who now owns a Caring Transitions franchise in Great Neck, New York. A few years ago, he worked on a sale that included several antique chests from China and Korea, which ultimately sold for almost nothing. “It was devastating,” he recalled. “But I’ve seen examples of the same pieces being sold for hundreds of dollars in South Carolina or Georgia.” The people who ultimately bought them in fact picked them up on their way down south, where, he assumed, they’d be reselling them for a lot more than they’d paid.
Everybody in the industry also has a story of an unexpected treasure. At the 19th-century farm house, Barzen picked up a tin can. “I was like, two dollars?” No, she discovered. “It turns out it was this novelty can.” The local museum curator knew a guy. It went for $700. Once, she sold a Picasso lithograph (price undisclosed). “Every house has something,” said Siepierski. “I have a house this weekend with antique firefighting equipment.” This is the magic of estate sales. Most things aren’t special, but anything could be. It’s the seller’s job to recognize it, the result of obsessive and ongoing research into pretty much all topics that exist. (“You have to be a generalist,” Siepierski told me, launching into a cautionary tale about a colleague who hadn’t recognized the true value of an antique lamp: “that could have been a $2,800 mess up!”) It is, of course, the buyer’s job to hope they don’t.
Sometimes, the value is beside the point. After her mother died, Charity Bell-Burke, 53, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of objects. “I mean, my mom had 30 wreaths,” she marveled. “Why would you need that many wreaths?” But while you cannot outsource grief, you can outsource labor. She hired a woman in her mother’s neighborhood who did estate sales, and in the end, the family netted $18,000: “I got paid for her to clean out the house, is how I felt about it.” I’d lurked in Reddit threads about the particular pain of watching people sift through a lifetime’s worth of memories “just looking for a deal.” But for her, it hadn’t been like that. She liked the idea that people would get to know her mother, a professor with a penchant for ginger jar lamps. “I’m sort of woo woo,” she laughed, “but I do kind of believe that items have energy, and that you can send that energy on.”