Searching For the Best Garage Sales

If you live in a big city, you can probably get frustrated by Craigslist listing for garage sales. In my city, people start posting their garage sale listings for Saturday over a week in advance, and sometimes they don't repost the listing on Friday or Saturday closer to the date. You get stuck looking through a week's worth of listings for garage sales to make your plan.

There's an easier way to pick out the better garage sales in your area.

 First, let me say, browsing Craigslist listings are 100% better on an Apple device, using the Craigslist Pro app. You can bookmark the listings you are interested in to your phone to review later.

 I start by just browsing the listings in the order they show up. I scan the city or zip code listed, and review app the listings for the ones that are close by. I bookmark any of them that look remotely interesting to me.

Here's where the fun comes in. I typically would not randomly go to a garage sale in the next county over (a 30 minute drive or so), especially when there are sales near me. However, if there is something I am specifically looking for, I want to know about it, and make the decision whether to garage sale in that area or not.

So instead of reading through each individual listings for further off cities, I will search for certain keywords. Here are some of the keywords I search for:

• American Girl
• Designer
• Coach
• Littlest Pet Shop
• Little Einsteins
• Cents (This will pull up all the listings where people indicate that they are selling most things for 50 cents or 25 cents)
• Gymboree
• Hanna Andersson
• Matilda Jane
• Pottery Barn
• Toys
• Stuffed Animals
• 3t
• Bag (This will pull up listings where people say "Fill a bag for $X")
• Church (Will pull up big church sales)
• Rummage (Will pull up bigger group sales)
• Subdivision (Will pull up whole subdivision sales)
• Fundraiser (Will pull up group sales)
• Consignment (Will pull up consignment sales that may be interesting)
• Neighborhood (Will pull up neighborhood sales)
• Consultant (Will pull up listings for former multi-level-marketing consultants who may be liquidating their inventory--like former Pampered Chef, Avon, Thirty One, etc. reps)

Check back and we will talk about how we organize the sales in order of preference and create an agenda and route.