Estate sales typically involve the liquidation of a home.
But, of course, the home itself is just one of many pieces of property that often needs to go when an owner dies or moves to an assisted living facility or retirement home.
Everything But The House is helping people offload, “literally, everything but the house,” mixing old-school practices with online auctions.
The startup claims to conduct 50 to 60 sales a month and attract 350,000 monthly unique visitors from all 50 states and 46 countries. It says it sold $9.9 million in goods in 2013, and expects to do $14 million in volume in 2014.
The company plans to use the $13 million in Series A funding that it recently raised to expand out of smaller markets like Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lexington, Kentucky, into big cities like Boston, Chicago and Denver, TechCrunch reports.
Everything But The House starts the estate sale process off in a fairly traditional manner: It sends an employee to a home who sorts and photographs items, and disposes of those that are deemed unsellable.
After that, it gives the process a digital boost by putting the items up for bidding on its website. The online auctions last seven days and make the goods available to a much larger pool of potential buyers than traditional estate sales. Theoretically, that could drive up the sales prices of items.
Everything But The House says proceeds from the sales it hosts are three to five times higher than proceeds from the sales conducted by traditional estate services.
Local buyers pick up what they’ve purchased two days after a sale ends, while out-of-town buyers get their items shipped to them, according to TechCrunch. The whole process is supposed to take about 30 days.
