Mere weeks later, COVID arrived in New York. A few companies tried to continue holding estate sales in person, posting mask advisories and limits on capacity. But I knew that would stop, and it did; once governors started announcing stay-at-home orders,
estatesales.netbegan automatically pulling listings for non-appointment in-person sales in states with stay-at-home orders. That April, I saw a local listing that was advertising what I thought looked like an in-person sale anyway, but when I called the man on the other end scrabbled around for a moment and then hung up on me.For at least a month, there were almost no sales at all. Stuff sat inside, unsold. I imagined it thickening, straining against the walls of the homes of recently deceased, Depression-era residents of Long Island, their dishes growing heavy in cupboards, “digger” basements growing even more filled with dust. But the pause was brief—the estate-sale business is intimately tied to the real-estate market, and the latter has boomed in the last year and a half. In late spring, 2020, estate-sale companies increasingly began switching to an online auction model, photographing items and then putting them up for auction at a 1-dollar or 2-dollar starting price with curbside pickup. These online sales proved extraordinarily lucrative during the pandemic: in 2020, Caring Transitions earned 17 million dollars in revenue on its proprietary online auction platform, compared with about 9 million dollars the year before. “In the 22 years in the industry, 2020 and 2021 have been the busiest years I’ve ever had”, Grant Panarese, who runs the virtual estate-sale platform AuctionNinja along with his wife, Christie, told me. “I’ve never seen years like this in my life.” Virtual platforms upend the traditional estate-sale dynamic: to get the best goods at an online estate sale, there’s no need to get in line at dawn. A typical customer, Panarese said, “has dinner, a glass of wine, and sits down for an hour and bids.”
This model favors the retail consumer. Online auctions can feel more sporting. There’s a sharp, competitive rush to winning an item at an online auction that you don’t quite get when you go in person to haggle. Theoretically, you or I have as good a chance as any seasoned picker of claiming the winning bid on a Herman Miller when the auction winds toward its close. But when I tried scoring a formerly $10,000 couch on a virtual estate sale during lockdown, I failed miserably, my heart racing as the maximum bid rose and rose. In 2020 and 2021, demand has exploded for regular home goods, such as couches and dining tables, a result of hasty exoduses to the suburbs and supply-chain issues or long back orders at furniture companies. “People say they can’t sell brown wood, but we get crazy numbers for brown wood”, Panarese said. “If it’s in good condition, we can sell it.”
I spent each morning of spring, 2020, at home, staring glassily at whatever auction was being held that day, scrolling past sectionals, table lamps, clustered picture frames, bookends. I thought often of the people I’d met at sales and fretted about whether they’d ever be able to return to doing this in person. I couldn’t tell if this first-name-only world was truly a fragile one—whether the pickers would reassemble like cockroaches once the sales came offline again, or if this universe would just disintegrate…When I asked estate-sale company owners about their businesses, they always talked about the social aspect, and how much people liked to be able to touch the things they bought. But during 2020’s lockdown, they all also started saying that virtual sales were much more lucrative. “Right now, I’m going to stick with online auctions”, Debbie Bertoli, of Treasured Tag Sales, Inc., who had never done virtual sales before the pandemic, told me last summer; currently, many sales are being held online again during the Omicron surge. As much of the country gradually began to reopen in the spring of 2021, AuctionNinja retained nearly all of the 500 vendors it ballooned to during the pandemic; Caring Transitions is still doing brisk business on its online platform. “In-person sales are a dinosaur!” Panarese said. But, by the middle of last year, the number of in-person sales on
estatesales.nethad, according to its C.E.O., gone back to pre-pandemic levels. Although Omicron has forced more sales back online for the time being, the fear—or hope—that estate sales will switch permanently to an online model doesn’t seem to be panning out. “Never”, insisted LoSquadro, of Sisters in Charge, when I talked to her this past summer. She had recently hired Fast Eddie to help with the load. (“People read him wrong. He’s very honest”, she said.) Her online sales were doing “phenomenal”, but she was also booked for in-person sales through September. The reason, she said, was simple. “People like to get out of their house.”The demise of the in-person estate sale might be like that of the brick-and-mortar bookstore—constantly foretold but never decisively coming to pass, an industry both fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.