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Let the shopping begin!
Organizing a neighborhood yard sale is quite easy to do. And if you play your cards right it can be quite profitable! In fact, you could even turn organizing yard sales into a full time business. Run over to your town or city hall and see if they could use someone like you to organize yard sales for your community. This sort of activity may be just what your town needs!
You will be surprised by how many residents will want to participate in neighborhood yard sales. And those who do not participate by selling will surely participate by shopping. All your community needs is someone to get the ball rolling. That person can be you!
Pick a weekend for the yard sale and plan on running it both Saturday and Sunday. Do not pick a holiday weekend when residents are likely to be gone. You want all the residents to be home so they can either sell or shop! Once you have the date, time and location locked in make up some flyers. If you want to offset the cost of the flyers ask some local businesses to cover the cost of the flyers in exchange for a small advertisement on the flyer!
Call the residents or go door to door and tell them you are organizing a neighborhood yard sale and ask them if they would like to participate. Explain to them that they do not need to empty their entire house but that they can just set up a table or two with items to sell. Give them some flyers so they can pass them around to their friends. Even if they say they do not want to participate ask them if they will pass out some flyers as a way to help the other neighbors. And convince them that they must walk the neighborhood during the sale to find some gems that others are practically giving away!
Advertise the yard sale in the local paper. If this costs too much remind the editor that you are doing a very good deed for the community and that you will be bringing repeat advertising to the paper. You should get a fair price with the right amount of convincing. Also put flyers up at local businesses. Ask mom and pop shop owners if they will stick flyers in their customer's shopping bags. Get the word out there as much as you can! The more people who know about the yard sale the more junk the neighbors will sell!
A few days before the sale contact all the neighbors who showed interest in the sale and remind them about the big day. You can also encourage everyone to offer some freebies to yard sale shoppers like ice water, snacks, little bags of treats for the kids... and use of their rest rooms! The more friendly the sellers are are the more sales they will make. And happy Saturday shoppers are more likely to come back on Sunday too... with their friends!
Have all your neighbors collect the names and email addresses of their shoppers. Then when you plan the next community yard sale you can contact everyone who came before. Your community yard sales will soon have a big following and you will have great success at turning your services into cold hard cash!
Follow Darlene on Twitter and get to know her by visiting her web site at www.darlenemichaud.com
Comments
There is one area in town called the Tree Streets that has a huge yard sale every year. The folks seemed to have gotten too attached to their stuff, tho, because the prices are now thru the roof. I think I may try to get our little neighborhood to have one. Do you think we should have it the same weekend as the Tree Streets?
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