Scavenger Life Episode 424: 1 Year Later, Our New Rental is Done!

Congrats on the latest rental.

2019-08-11 – 2019-08-17

Total Items In Store: 3205
Items Sold: 16
Cost of Items Sold: $50
Total Sales: $587.90
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Bible)
Average Price Sold: $ 36.74
Money Spent on New Inventory: $54.40
Number of items listed: 9

The new rental looks pretty snazzy!

Gut Sales Report for the week: Decent Sales. Just a lot of returns.

Challenge of the week: Getting all of my supplies ordered and filled up in preparation for the busy season. Seems like the longer I am in this business, the more supplies I need. The $150 in supplies from ebay from having an anchor store is really helping. I sell a wide range of items and I need some very large boxes in non-standard sizes. I like stocking up and getting ready, it makes me feel that I can handle anything that comes my way now.

Scavenge of the week: I bought some really old golf clubs in a bag. I was going to sell them as a set, but it turns out I can make a lot more by spliting everything up and selling them separately. I paid $17 for the whole bag, and my total listing price by separating it all out is $376. Not the easiest way to do it, but definitely most profitable. Jay recommended this method to me and it is a winning approach.

Mark S

Ha! I grew up on the Eastern Shore. All my family and friends still live there.

Congratulations guys. Good job! Now you want to come visit Atlanta and help me on the next two spec houses. Bet you guys are old hands at the scheduling subs and dealing with city and county officials by now.

When are we going to see Luray tourist guides having entries like “visit the Jay and Ryanne Valley”, or “visit J&R Estates while touring the Shenandoah Valley”. Hey that sounds like a RANCH.. J&R Cattle Ranch. Maybe get a local blacksmith the make you guys iron branding rods and burn your J&R logo into local wood products like rough sawn round stake platters, wooden coasters, screen print the J&R Logo on BBQ aprons. A whole line of self made products based on the J&R Branding. Soaps, mugs.. etc., etc.

Build your rentals around the “Alpine”, “Farm”, “Small Town, and “Ranch” themes and offer discount coupons to area activites that tie into those themes. Let a local farmer have some land beside the Farm House and plant a large garden and in return guests to the Farm House get to help plant, weed, pick some veggies, City folk get coupons to local events, music, visit town hall, city court, whatever and whatever. 🙂

Strike while the “iron is hot” 🙂 [sorry about that, couldn’t resist]. LOL

All kidding aside good job. Onward and upward.

Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by MDC Galleries & Fine Art.

Listening while posting, great news!

8/11– 8/17/19 (no cross listing is done between platforms)

eBay store: totommyto

Total store items: 714
Number of items sold: 9
Total eBay sales (not counting s/h): $258.45
Cost of items sold: $13
Highest price sold: $55 – GM Silverado decal set – dealer throw away, no cost!
Average price sold: $28
Returns: One – 0
Money spent on new inventory: $65
Number of new items listed this week: 7
Sell through rate for the week: 1.0
Number International sales: 2

Etsy store oldfleatoymarket

Total store items: 660
Number of items sold: 4
Total Etsy sales (not counting s/h): $79
Cost of items sold: $8
Highest price sold: $40 – 8lb rusty boat anchor, paid $5
Average price sold: $19.75
Returns: 0
Money spent on new inventory: $20
Number of new items listed this week: 7
Sell through rate for the week: 0.6
Number International sales: 0

Aug. 11-17
Total Items in Store: 2452
Items Sold: 21
Total Sales : $438
* Below yearly average of $938
Highest Price: $40 (Welby Kundo Anniversary Clock FOR PARTS/REPAIR)
Average Price: $21
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $44
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $48
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 33

Congratulations on completing another rental! It looks so nice! It’s been another soft week for me. But this was expected. August is historically my least profitable month. I just see it as less time having to pack and having more time to list.

Last week I tried my hand with an online auction… and I suddenly remembered why I hate online auctions. I won a few crappy lots right off the bat, but the items I really wanted went way beyond what I would ever be willing to pay. So I had to drive an hour just to go pick up junk. And it really was just junk. I’ll be lucky to even make a couple hundred bucks out of the whole thing, which isn’t bad but it was a lot of work. While I was there, I overheard a conversation between the workers and a guy who was apparently responsible for buying most of the stuff (and driving up all the prices). From the sound of it, he was in way over his head. He didn’t really even have a way to transport or store everything that he bought. It reminded me of the amateur storage auction buyers who dream of making tons of money but don’t know how much extra work goes into it once they’ve won the units.

So after putting it off for so long, I decided to set up my business policies on eBay. It wasn’t as confusing as I thought it would be once I understood what I was looking at when it pulled all of my different shipping methods. I managed to concentrate it down to about a dozen policies. The whole process took a couple of hours, but I reckon it’ll take me about 5 minutes to put my store on vacation mode with extended handling as opposed to the 30-40 minutes it usually takes.

Week August 11 – 17, 2019

Items in store: 4307 Listings for 6229 Items
Items Sold: 93 transactions for 111 Items
Gross Sales: $7170.80
Highest Price Sold: $580 …. LVC Sheepskin Jacket
Highest Single Transaction $1139.81….19 Wallets
Lowest Price Sold: $4.99….Shoelaces
Average Sale Price: $64.60
Cost of Goods Sold $576, Plus consignment @ roughly $600
Number of new items listed this week: 109 items
$$ spent on new inventory this week $348
Repeat Customers: 6

The wallet sale was a big relief after 5 months with only 1 low offer on a large batch of wallets I picked up. Out of no-where some guy comes in and buys 2 of them, then about 8 hours later comes back and buys 17 more, all without even making an offer. Gotta love that. So many more to go, they should pick up for the holiday season, as they are all new in gift boxes. Glad to get a nice chunk of that investment back, after thinking they may have been a bad buy.

Items in Store 1201
Items Sold 21
Total Sales $3,052.00
COGS $1,552.00
Total Profit $1,500.00
Average profit $71.43
Average sales price $145.33
New Listings 28

Summer sales goal:
$625 over my weekly goal of $875. Currently trailing my cumulative summer goal by $800.60
This big week put me in the ballpark of meeting my goal.

I sold a pinball machine this week for $2500, paid $1500. I would have liked to get a bit more for it, but the buyer is a very reputable dealer so I know it will be a smooth transaction. Their shipper will pick it up this week.

I noticed that ebay turned my clothing sales tap on this week. Hopefully that trend continues. I definitely need to get a BUNCH more clothing listed.

Nothing much to talk about scavenger wise. The yard sale season is pretty much over. This time of year the yard sales suck. That’s ok – it will be time to hunker down and attack my death mountain (it’s way past “pile” stage) this fall.

Congrats on finishing another rental! Are you going to continue t renovate the other floors while you have guests? Is that going to cause noise problems?

Week August 11-17, 2019

Total Items in Store: 1034
Items Sold: 13
Cost of Items Sold: $166.99 (22.3% of sales)
Total Sales: $748.95
Highest Price Sold: $155 (1996 Soundgarden Down on the Upside)
Average Price Sold: $57.61
Returns: 0 (2 NPB though)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $138
Number of items listed this week: 39
Promoted listings test: 7 sales, $420.97 (56.2% of total sales), $19.35 fees (4.6% of sales)

Decent week, would love that volume to increase, but the high average sale price is working out. Last week I mentioned picking up a big box of smalls/bread & butter stuff that will sell for $20-$30 each – I’ve listed 30 items out of the box and so far have already sold 4 items for $90, so already turning a profit and the rest of the box is gravy.

Outside of the high dollar record I sold, this was another good sale: 300+ early world stamps, paid $10 and wanted $150-$200 but took a $100 offer after a year.

Hey Jay and Ryanne I just wanted to stop in and say great job on the new rental and exterior! I wish they were closer since they all look great. Love the pops of color and modern style. Best of luck trying to spread yourself among the various businesses you are managing. Back to spinning plates. Hope you have reliable help.

I’m still on hiatus as we are back from a great vacation – admittedly not scavenger style enough but enjoyable. We saw four colleges. Now moving packing and moving my dad this weekend from Northern California, while trying to work the day job a couple of days in between.

Looking forward to getting back to Ebay and stocking up for Fall. My store is closed and down by about half to 200+/-, and it’s tempting to do some cleaning up of listings and bite the business policies bullet. Have a great week!

Congratulations on the new rental unit!

It’s been a fair to middlin’ week on ebay.

Sales: CAD$911, 9 sales, COGS: $192 –> Item profit: $565
Expenditures: $111 –> Cashflow: $647
Listed: $320, 9 items
Hours: 6
Notable sales: nothing earth shattering, my favourite sale is $120 for 4 knives from a big lot of silverware purchased 2 years ago.
I got my hands on some nice toners but again, nothing staggering.

I had $600 worth of offers on Thursday but I got greedy and stupidly countered them – crickets in return. Oh well.

Have a few questions. Why do you not input commercials in your podcast and get paid for that? I wouldn’t complain too much about a few commercials weaved into these wonderful podcast! How do you ship your Capadimonte (Italian Porcelain)? I have a few listed (none sold yet). But I’m not looking forward to shipping when they sell. I appreciate you guys every week! I look forward to your podcast! I always listen to it while shipping my weekend sales on Monday morning. Also, you should design a “Sell Trash, Be free” Shirt.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by racrac7.

First comment! Just wanted to say as far as managed payments, they do send payments daily. It just takes 2-4 days to hit your account. So, if you have daily sales you get daily deposits. I had one day since switching where I didnt have a sale, so there was one day I did not receive a deposit.
As far as managed payments in general goes, DO NOT do it if you are living transaction to transaction. My second week I had to borrow from my husband’s paypal to cover shipping because it took so long to transfer from my bank into paypal. I have since switched back to pirateship for the convenience of using my bank card as you cannot ship through eBay with anything but paypal.
You also cannot use GSP with managed payments, so keep that in mind. I ship directly so it didnt affect me there.

Lovely job on the rental. It looks awesome!

And… wow! I wish we could pay a handyman $30 per hour! In Corpus Christi we get nailed a whopping $75 per hour on our rentals!

Week of 08/11-08/17
Total Items in Store: 3,387 (Up 33% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 141
Number of Items Sold: 96 (Up 45% YOY)
(Includes 0 Etsy, 10 Poshmark, 1 Bonanza, 0 TrueGether)
Weekly STR: 12% (Up 1% YOY)

Total Product Sales: $2,886 (Up 66% YOY)
Sales Volume Variance to Prior Year: Up $790
Sales Price Variance to Prior Year: Up $357
Cost of Items Sold: $528
Cost of Labor: $263
Highest Item Sold: $175 – Tecovas Boots
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Veronica wins the week and Veronica leads for the year 19-15.

Clothing
# Listed: 1,949
# Sold: 61
STR: 13%
ASP: $28.47

Shoes
# Listed: 845
# Sold: 23
STR: 12%
ASP: $37.92

Hard Goods
# Listed: 593
# Sold: 12
STR: 9%
ASP: $23.09

EBay
# Listed: 3,387
# Sold: 86
STR: 11%
ASP: $28.38

Etsy
# Listed: 216
# Sold: 0
STR: 0%
ASP: $0

Poshmark
# Listed: 862
# Sold: 10
STR: 5%
ASP: $44.50

Congrats on the new rental. Always nice when a new little gold mine starts to produce income. One little mine at a time. We are looking to get into the game ourselves very shortly. Stay tuned…

Trying to crank away today and tomorrow. Veronica and I are leaving Wednesday for a 1 week trip to Montana to help out my mom on some projects. After that we have the Junk Jaunt at the end of September, and my hunting trip in late October (that Veronica may hang with me a few days at the beginning, which would be GREAT!), then the hard push through the holidays. Where has the year gone…???

The good, the bad and the ugly of Poshmark selling

Friends – specially Ryanne – I was introduced by Lonnie from Garage Flips to Amber’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCExQA82vipSKRs1ayVb_eLg) called Amber Resells.

As usual I was a little skeptic but my perception changed from the get go. It is something like “everything you ever wanted to know about selling on Poshmark but was afraid to ask and did not have a clue of whom to ask”

Further, Jay (and possibly T-Satt), she supports her cases, her tips and hints with actual data. There is a video where she mentions 4 tips to avoid cases and low ratings where she starts off detailing the numbers and data she used to reach those conclusions.

I am sure many of you will love it.

PH

Yay on the rental! Pics look great. Wish I could go on vacation, but there’s always work to be done.

Last summer was a break from sourcing and relaxing. This summer has been crazy with work for my other business, plus working through the backlog. I haven’t seriously sourced in over a month and a half, but I have started buying stock again on Ebay and listing through huge chunks of backlog at a time to make up for it. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve even been in a thrift store since late June. Who even am I?! I almost went thrifting today, but just knocked out a bunch of backlog instead and fought the urge to thrift. I am going to make it a goal to start sourcing again out in the world in September. Sort of feeling FOMO about it at this point.

To continue with this “mentorship” discussion, if people do want to learn, a mooc in general business courses would probably do a lot of resellers some good. I’ve been taking non-business classes through edx that are just free straight up college courses, including some at the grad level! There’s no need to pay anyone to learn, especially something as easy as just listing random junk on Ebay.

Hi scavengers! Been listing like crazy this summer. Sales were strong for me May-Jun-July and August I am down 6% thus far all things same. I am so ready for fall clothing sales!

New air bnb looks amazing! You do such a great job decorating and making it look comfy. I have stayed at too many rentals where it’s very cheap/collapsible feeling.

Re: Paying for mentorship -I do think there is value in it! But there is a difference in Mentorship and Courses. And some people don’t get they are different. I would not pay for reselling courses, but I would pay for custom mentorship catered to my business / life specifically.

Congrats on the new rental being up and operational!

Re: paying for courses/mentorship: No thanks. I’m terribly stubborn, and have heard way too many horror stories about bad, overpriced courses. I don’t really learn well in a conventional manner anyway. I’ve pretty much got to learn by trying, doing, failing, correcting, and improving at my own pace, on my own time. A course would likely break that cadence, and I’d end up either frustrated or feeling like I’d been “taken” They might work for others, but I won’t be a customer…

August 11-17, 2019

Store 1
Total Items in Store: 1,698
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $445.43
Cost of Items Sold: $39.00
Highest Price Sold: $49.99
Average Price Sold: $23.44
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $290.38
Number of items listed this week: 40

Store 2 (CAD)
Total Items in Store: 1008
Items Sold: 16
Gross Sales: $197.84
Cost of Items Sold: $10.25
Highest Price Sold: $16.99 (vintage patch)
Average Price Sold: $12.37
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $76.00
Number of items listed this week: 25

Amazon.ca sales: $1,250.08 (Approx $375.02 net profit)
Amazon.com sales (USD): $2,236.10 (Approx $894.44 net profit)

Pretty average week in both ebay stores. Steady, but lots of low dollar sales. Doing a bit more listing, so numbers are slowly trending upwards between the listing and summer coming to an end.

Amazon was rocking last week. Canadian sales came up substantially. Largely due to some book sourcing/selling I’ve been doing. I’ve been sending used books into FBA for the last month or two, and I’m starting to see consistent sales there. Partner that with school season about to kick off, and away we go! In the USA, Amazon sales have been trending up. I’ve added another eight replenishable/refillable skus to my offerings, and have been doing a much better job of keeping everything in stock. The two combined have pushed my numbers back up.

On an amazon note that may be of interest, they’ve just rolled out a beta program where they’ll allow your items to sell, even before they hit the warehouses. The give the buyer an estimated delivery date based on the expected arrival of your units to the FC’s. I enrolled two days ago, and it’s already resulted in a sale for me. Might help to smooth out short-term inventory outages going forward.

On Friday, we went to a large annual flea market about an hour away. We were there when the gates opened at 8:00am, and finished around 6:30pm. We stopped for about an hour total for snacks, lunch, and to drop merchandise off at the truck. Got a lot of bread and butter items, with a few higher dollar items. I wore my gopro, and have about three hours of footage, I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t been able to condense it into a shorter video. Maybe this week at some point…

On a personal note, we’re in the midst of lawyers, lenders, and realtors as the paperwork gets finished for our new home. Closing date is next Friday (30th). The house itself is move-in ready fortunately. I’ve picked up some new LED light fixtures for the garage (our new work space), and have started getting quotes for someone to mud/tape/sand the drywall in there. Have to order the paint/urethane that’s going to go onto the floor this week. Fortunately, we have a month between possession and having to be out of the home we’re currently renting, so we can take our time moving and getting the work space ready.

All of your AirBnBs look great! I’ve been listening to the Shampoo & Booze podcasts even though I don’t have one. Maybe some day, after we get out of our current house.

I agree with your assessment that sales are strangely consistent. My sales every week in August is about the same amount. Just the number of sales and the average sale price changes.

Week of Aug 11 – 17
* Total Items in Store: 1438 eBay, 3 Etsy
* Items Sold: 13
* Cost of Items Sold: $43.40 + $0 Commission
* Total Sales: $313.05
* Highest Price Sold: $74.65 Duck wildlife painting
* Average Price Sold: $24.08
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $10
* Number of items listed this week: 9

This past weekend, I visited a family friend to pick up items he wants to sell. His wife passed away early January. I was already doing commissions for her, so this is just an extension of that. It’s a lot of glass and china, some fabric and jewelry, and two coats. Not terribly exciting.

This summer, I’ve been getting mostly free items and this commission stuff, but I still want to source. That’s the best part of eBay selling, isn’t it? I have a neighbor running a MaxSold auction, and I might bid on some of her items (it won’t be the hour drive to pickup my stuff!). My next auction isn’t until the middle of next month.

Hi Jay and Ryanne,

Regarding the auction you guys went to that you ran out of room in the truck:

U-Haul rents trailers for $15 to $30 a day. There are a bunch of different size open and enclosed trailers to choose from.

There is no mileage charge, as long as you return it to the same place you rented it. They’ll also do one way, but will charge you for the drop off fee.

Putting a hitch and the wiring on your pickup shouldn’t be more than a couple of hundred dollars. Once it’s on there, you’ll be set. No need to buy a big box truck yet.

Congrats on the new rental…

I’m having withdrawals for episode 425. I’m guessing J&R are doing their “career jobs” and haven’t uploaded it yet. Just missing hearing you guys on my Monday which is now Tuesday. Stay safe! Sell trash and be free!!!

Thanks Jay!!