This is my Sydney and New South Wales Garage Sale blog.
If you have anything
to say about this subject, you can do it here. So, please give it a go.
If you have had a garage sale you can write about your experience and provide some tips
and hints for others.
If you have other ideas for diverting unused items from landfill let everyone know here.
This website is not just about garage sales it is also about sustainability and different ways of
finding new uses for old and forgotten items. Any useful information will be posted.
Finally, if you have any comments about this website, no matter whether good
or bad, you can leave them here as well as sending me an email.
Finally finished updating the site [2016-12-01 16:35:07]
I finally finished updating this site to make it work on mobile devices and it looks much different now. The functionality is still the same except that I have removed some redundant clicks and it should now be a bit faster to post a garage sale. The steps are still the same, you register, create a garage sale and upload some pictures with descriptions if you want to.
The whole process is quite fast. It took 3.5 minutes to register and enter the details of a garage sale on my mobile phone and another 1.5 minutes to upload a picture. This should be even faster on a desktop computer.
It was a lot of work changing all the pages and programs. I think I have reviewed and updated tens of thousands of lines of code. I think it was worth it and hope that Google will finally realise that my site is the best garage sale website in Sydney (just kidding, where are those smiley icons when you need one) and will put it at the top of the garage sale search results.
I would love to find out what you think about the update, no matter whether your comments are positive or negative. Please send me an email or add a comment to this article and let me know.
There is still a lot to do and plenty of room for improvement. If you have any suggestion or ideas please let me know as well.
About the author: Andy, the builder and operator of this site
How much can you earn with a garage sale survey [2012-09-06 00:39:47]
I have finally passed 20 responses in my survey and as promised have started to summarise the numbers. Due to the small numbers of responses there are not many conclusions that can be drawn from the data.
A few thing are quite interesting though. Both the mean and the median amount earned per sale are over $500. That means 50% of all garage sales make more than $500. This is much more than I had expected. My estimate was around half of that.
Interestingly, there is one sale that did not make any money and one that made $3000. This shows that anything is possible, you can make either nothing or a fortune.
The sale that made $3000 was a sale where several households were involved. The highest amount per house was $1875 which is still amazing.
There appears to be a trend to hold combined garage sales. So far, the highest number of houses per garage sale reported was 5 but I have seen ads where entire streets were involved. It would be interesting to see whether combined garage sales make more money per house than single garage sales. Unfortunately, I do not have enough data to look at this. In fact, the few numbers I am showing on my survey results page might not be meaningful at all.
It could well be that my survey is heavily biased, that mostly people who have had a successful sale can be bothered to take it.
Even though I am collection postcodes, I cannot tell whether the survey was taken by people in certain areas and weather garage sales are more successful in some suburbs than others.
All in all, this survey has risen more questions than answers. It's a real shame, in over a year I managed to collect only 24 responses. The good news is that numbers on my survey result page get updated automatically as new survey responses come in.
Last but not least,if you have had a garage sale in the past, have not taken this survey yet and remember how much you have made, can you please take my survey. It takes only a few seconds. If you have anything to say about this subject, I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send me an email.
The Cancer Council has a new initiative called "Garage Thing" [2012-08-12 19:58:23]
I usually do not do this but since it is for such a good cause and can be part of a garage sale, I am making an exception.
The Cancer Council's "Garage Thing" involves selling used and unwanted items and donating either some of, or all of the money raised to the Cancer Council.
We all know someone who has cancer and tragically nearly a third of all deaths in NSW are related to cancer.
Your assistance will help the Cancer Council fund research initiatives, provide support to cancer patients and local communities, as well as provide education services within the community. Their long term goal is to eradicate cancer, but they cannot do this on their own.
To make your garage sales part of this great cause, simply register online at, www.doyourthing.com.au/garage-thing. Once you have registered, the Cancer Council will supply you with a kit that provides all the necessary donation information.
Please do not dump your unwanted goods - have a garage sale instead [2012-05-27 23:37:15]
I have taken the two pictures below on my way to the station that I walk every day when I go to work. Meanwhile the TV and the cupboard have been sitting there for a few weeks. They have been illegally dumped.
When I first saw the TV it looked undamaged but it has been vandalised since then. I am sure it was working when it was first dumped. Someone could have found a use for it and maybe even would have paid a few bucks for it. The same goes for the cupboard. It could have found a use in someone's garage or shed.
Leaving them there is very selfish behaviour because it spoils the environment for many people and puts the responsibility of disposal on someone else.
I hate looking at those items and cannot understand why people do it. The dumpers must live nearby too and maybe they see the dumped items every day, as they walk to the station or their cars.
Electronic components contain poisonous components and need to be disposed of safely. The dumped and vandalised TV may now be contaminating the environment with poisonous substances.
It would have been so easy to dispose of those items responsibly. With a garage sale the dumpers could have even made a few bucks and with a virtual garage sale all they would have had to do was to spend a couple of minutes online to advertise the items. Ringing the council and arranging a free booked clean-up would have been easy too.
I live in Dulwich Hill and unfortunately see illegally dumped rubbish all the time. Sometimes it is being examined by a council ranger trying to determine its origin. They have not got much success though. That's why I have decided to name and shame illegal dumpers on this website. If you see anyone doing any illegal dumping, take a picture with your mobile, preferably without being noticed in order to avoid a confrontation, send it to me and I will post it on this website.
Advertising on the internet is not a silver bullet [2012-01-22 13:10:29]
Recently someone advertised their garage sale on this website and nobody came. This person had placed their ad one week before the date of the sale which would have been enough time for people to see it and possible even Google to index it. Still, nobody came.
I do not know the exact circumstances of that sale but it was on a rainy weekend and not much after Christmas when people were still recovering from the holiday spending.
I feel sorry for the person who held this sale and wonder whether somehow my website is giving the impression that all you need to do to have a successful garage sale is advertise on it.
This is definitely not the case. This website is still new and not that well known. It is not getting as many visitors as some of the big classifieds websites. I am trying to mitigate this by presenting my pages in a format that can be easily indexed by search engines so the ads will not just be visible on this site but also come up on search engine queries. This only works if the ads are placed a reasonable time, at least two weeks, ahead of the sale.
Of course, you could advertise your sale on other websites as well. Some of the big free classifieds websites have a garage sale section and there are a few pay sites too. I have listed some of them on my resources page.
Besides placing an ad there are other things you can do to have a successful garage sale. This where some of the other garage sales websites are better than this site. They give you advice on how to have a successful sale and might be worth having a look. There are some very good American sites which I probably should mention on my resources page.
If you have any advice on having a great garage sale or comments about this website or article, please add a comment. I would love to hear it.
