Being Nice At An Estate Sale Made Me And Extra $1,000

I went to an estate sale last weekend. It was listed on EstateSales.net and I scoped out the pictures ahead of time and they had a lot of GOOD books. I was able to look up specific books using the online images and could even see exactly where they were in the house.

Now I generally don’t rush to get to estate sales SUPER early, regardless of what’s for sale. I always find things to FLIP but I don’t enjoy the stress that can come with the “rush” when people can almost fight over getting to certain items first.

So this sale hands out numbers and I was #43. I was about an hour early so I went back to sit in the car until it opened at 9am. On the way back, I have a friendly conversation with another guy and I asked him if he was looking for anything in particular (a common topic at estate sales).

We chat for a bit (he wanted to pick up an expensive Bose radio that he saw in the pictures) and I told him that I was going to get some books. I asked him if he ever used Google Lens and, even though he had an Android phone, he had never heard of it. I showed him how it worked on some pictures from the EstateSales.net app and he was amazed. He tried it on his phone but he didn’t have service (even though I did (Verizon)).

I told him that if he needed to look up anything during the sale, just come find me and I’ll look it up real quick since I had service and he didn’t.

At this point, some people are likely thinking that I’m an idiot for ‘revealing’ that I was going for some books and tipping my hand that the books were profitable flips. Or that I’m a fool for showing my “competition” how to use Google Lens. Or what a dummy I must be to offer to take time to look something up for someone else (a “competitor” even).

And I get it. I just don’t agree.

Because that’s where this picture starts to make sense.

You see, this guy got there WAY EARLY (like 6am) and got two numbers. But his girlfriend decided not to stay so he had an extra number. So he offered to give me #17 which I happily accepted.

By the time I walked in as #17, there was already another person scanning the books. But they must not have looked ahead using the pictures online because ALL of the books that I REALLY wanted were exactly where they were in the pictures. So I just grabbed them without even scanning them and then scanned some more without the stress or pressure of the “rush”.

Seriously, just look at a couple of the books that I purchased for $2 each:

And all of this happened because I was just being nice. I guess this could be a ‘strategy’ but I think people should just be nice anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

Being nice and being #17 likely made me $1,000+ more than being #43.

But I did all of those nice things anyway, without knowing that it would “pay off”.

You see, I’m confident that if you do the right thing frequently enough, good things will happen. But there’s no ‘guarantee’ so many people won’t do it because they think transactionally. The only guarantee that you'll get is that if you don’t do these things, you’ll never go from #43 to #17.

I wrote a book about my adventures in flipping things from yard sales, thrift stores, and estate sales and I'm launching it on June 21st on a live webinar. Want a free copy? I'm giving the book away for free on the webinar.

Interested? You can join here: https://www.flips.net/booklaunch

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I'm hunting FLIPS and BOLOS with this $300 Gears of War Lancer Replica that I picked up at a thrift store for $12.99.