The Rush Is Coming
If you run estate auctions, you already feel it. The phone starts ringing more in March. By mid-April, you're juggling three cleanouts and trying to photograph 600 lots before the weekend.
Spring is when everything converges. Probate cases from winter deaths finalize. Families decide to sell the house before summer. Snowbirds come back and discover mom's storage unit. Downsizing season hits full force.
The auctioneers who win spring aren't the ones who work the hardest in April. They're the ones who built their systems in February and March.
How Long Does It Take to Catalog an Estate Sale?
A typical estate has 150-400 lots. Two estates a month is 300-800 lots. Even at 3 minutes per lot -- and that's moving -- that's 15-40 hours of cataloging alone.
The auctioneers scaling past two sales a month aren't writing faster descriptions. They've changed the process entirely.
What I've seen work:
Photograph first, describe later. Don't try to do both at the same time walking through the house. Spend one focused session just shooting -- front, back, bottom, detail, any marks or labels. Then describe everything in a batch afterward. You'll move twice as fast in both phases. (More on estate sale photography here.)
Pre-resize your photos before upload. If you're uploading to HiBid, their server re-processes every image. A full-resolution camera photo takes significantly longer to upload and process than a 1024px version. Batch resize locally. This cuts your upload time to about 10% of what it would otherwise be. (Full guide to HiBid CSV imports.)
Group before you write. All the furniture together, all the smalls together. Every time you switch categories your brain has to reset. Staying in one mode lets you move.
What's Moving This Spring
Mid-century is still selling but buyers are pickier. Generic pieces don't command what they did three years ago -- signed, documented, or unusual forms are where the premiums are.
Tools and workshop equipment keep outperforming estimates. Full garage workshops consistently beat expectations.
China and formal dining are still hard. Your consignors already know this but they'll ask anyway. Set expectations early.
Winning the Consignment
Spring is when competition for good estates heats up. What wins: bring a tablet with your last sale's catalog and let them scroll through it. Quality speaks for itself. Be upfront about what won't sell -- the auctioneer who gives honest estimates earns the listing over the one who inflates everything to get the signature. And speed matters. If you can turn around a catalog in a day instead of a week, families notice.
The Technology Gap
Most estate auctioneers still catalog manually. Spreadsheets, or worse, handwritten lot sheets. Technology adoption in this industry is years behind retail, real estate, even auto auctions.
That gap is an opportunity. If you can produce a professional, photo-rich catalog faster than your competitors, you win consignments. If your descriptions are more detailed and accurate, you attract more serious bidders and get higher hammer prices. (See the difference AI cataloging makes.)
AI cataloging tools exist now that generate titles, descriptions, and value estimates from photos in seconds. I'm biased -- I built one -- but the auctioneers investing in their cataloging workflow right now are the ones who'll handle 4-5 sales a month this spring while their competitors are still stuck at 2.
Your Early Spring Checklist
- Audit your photo workflow. How long does it take you to photograph 100 lots? If it's more than 2 hours, your setup needs work. Better lighting, a consistent backdrop, and a system for lot numbering in the field will pay for themselves in the first sale.
- Test your upload pipeline. Upload a batch of 200 photos to your platform of choice. Time it. If it takes more than 15 minutes, you have a resize or connection bottleneck to fix.
- Update your consignment materials. Your last sale should be your best pitch. Pull your 5 best lot photos and descriptions. Save them to your phone.
- Book your May sales now. The families calling in April want a May date. If your calendar is filling up, you're doing it right. If it's empty, your outreach needs to start this week.
Questions? Call me -- (412) 580-7398.