Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Home Staging Inventory at a Warehouse Sale

If you're an established home stager with inventory, a warehouse sale is a great way to eliminate unwanted inventory, earn cash, and even build relationships with clients!

During our last slow season, we decided it was time for an inventory clean out. We hosted a warehouse sale to make room in our warehouse and prep for new inventory.

In this blog post, we'll explain step-by-step how to hold a warehouse sale to sell your staging inventory.

If you feel like you’re too busy to think about this right now… Keep reading! You can prepare for a warehouse sale year-round, then hold the event during a slow time in your business.

How to Prep for a Warehouse Sale - Right Now!

Set Aside Items to Sell

Create a designated area for items that you want to sell. In Stageforce, you can create a separate ‘warehouse’ for that area. That way, when you stumble across an item that you no longer want, simply put it in that location and mark it in Stageforce.

Don't just put it back on the shelf with your other staging inventory! Taking this simple step will save you tons of time when you decide to host a warehouse sale.

If you don’t have the physical space to store these items separately, there are many ways to flag them in Stageforce. One option would be to create a project for your sale, or you could add a product category for sale items.

How to Decide What to Sell

1. Take a look at how often you are using each piece of inventory. There may be items that are just not the right scale or color for most of the homes you stage. This is a good indication that they are just taking up space in your warehouse and you would be better off getting some money for it so that you can buy something you do use a lot.
2. Damaged inventory that you don’t see yourself fixing or using in the future should be in the sale.
3. Check your inventory for incomplete sets. For example, a set of 6 dining chairs that is down to 5 because one was broken.
4. If you take on design or short-term rental styling clients, you might have some extra inventory laying around that was specific for one project and doesn't work for staging. Your sale is a good opportunity to unload those pieces!
5. Consider selling items that you can easily replace at wholesale cost. We love the Hazela sofa from Ashley and since we buy wholesale, we purchase it in bulk for a very low price. Even thought they were almost new, we displayed a few in our sale at more than double our cost. Once those were purchased, we replaced them with other Hazelas from our inventory. We sold sooo many, and placed an order afterwards to restock for ourselves!

BTW- You can find all of our favorite places to buy wholesale on our Vendor List in the Wholesale or SDP® Expert courses!

How to Use a Warehouse Sale as a Marketing Event

Make the first day of the sale a marketing event! Ask a local title or mortgage company to provide charcuterie and Prosecco and invite your VIP clients.

Be sure to ask them to RSVP so you have an idea of the number of attendees. Make your clients feel extra special by saying they get early access to your inventory.

Bonus Recommendations:

1. This is also a great time to offer a 5% discount for a 5-star Google review!
2. Have some printed forms available that agents can fill out to get a staging quote. Include fields for their name, phone number, email, listing address, list price, approx. square footage, and whether it is vacant or occupied.

How to Market Your Warehouse Sale 

1. Emails: Send out at least two emails before the sale. The first about a week before, and send the second the day before as a reminder. This will give your email list more than enough time to plan on attending.
2. Social Media: A few “stay tuned” Instagram stories before announcing the date/time of the sale will keep your followers' eyes peeled to your account, while giving them a preview of what you are selling.
3. Banner Outside: If you decide to hang a banner announcing your sale or use yard signs, display them AFTER your VIP Sale Day, so that event stays private and exclusive.
4. Facebook Groups: Utilize Facebook groups and Marketplace. Post in local estate sale groups, garage sale groups, and real estate groups.

When it comes to Marketplace, post individual listings (videos work great, too). But make sure you put in the description, “We’re too busy to answer the phone, so please come in to see if it is available. We can’t guarantee it will still be here when you arrive.”

Things to Do the Week of the Sale

We recommend posting a “Sale Rules” video on social media. Doing a quick explanation of the tagging system, where to park, how to pay, and that all sales were final saved us from a lot of questions. We were surprised by how many people watched it and commented on it at the sale!

We wish we would’ve done more video announcements mentioning to bring trucks or trailers, blankets/straps, and anything else customers may need to transport their purchases. Some buyers expected us to give them our own warehouse supplies.

Pricing Your Inventory

For pieces that are in ‘like-new’ condition, mark them up to about 2 - 2.5 x your wholesale cost. Markup less for used or damaged condition. For most items that have been gently used, you can generally expect to get back at least what you paid wholesale. That means you are able to refresh your inventory basically for free!

Negotiating 

Of course you hope that people will pay the prices you have marked, but many shoppers will want to haggle with you on the price.

We used a secret code for our minimum that any team member could negotiate to on any given item. This enables more people to help with the sale and helps ensure you dont sell things at prices lower than you want to take. Any 10-letter word will work. For example, Beachfront. B=0, E=1, etc. So if the code said EBB, then the lowest that we would go on that item would be $100.

Tagging and Holding Items

Each tag had the name of the item, the Stageforce inventory ID#, the dimensions, the price, and our secret code. Printed tags with your logo elevate the perceived value of your inventory, and they are so easy to create. Use the template included with your tags and merge it with your inventory list.

Larger Items

For large inventory items (couches, chairs, rugs, stools), attach a tag with a perforated stub. Ticket style tags work well for this. Print all information on both the large ticket and the stub. Buyers can tear off the stub and carry it until checking out.

You can get an inexpensive tagging gun to efficiently attach tags.

Pro Tip: Staple the perforated stub to your copy of the receipt. This will make it simpler to remove the sold items from Stageforce (or whatever inventory system you use).

Pillows and Accessories

Pillow and accessory tags do not require a stub as those will be carried to the checkout by your customers. Stickers work well for accessories, but use your tagging gun for pillows. Have some bags, boxes, and packing paper available.

Art

We found that art will sell better when it is hung, rather than leaning in stacks. As with accessories, perforated stubs would only be necessary on pieces that are too large to easily carry to the checkout.

Pro Tip: Have Post-It Notes available to your team so they can place a sold notice on items. We found just noting the buyers name and phone number on their items as they made selections made the checkout system much easier. Buyers would come to cash out and wouldn’t remember what items they had placed a hold on! Having their phone number enabled us to confirm whether they were still interested in an item.

Displaying Items for Sale

Remember what you know about the art of staging. When items are displayed at their best, the perceived value is raised.

Stage your furnishings in vignettes to the extent possible. Items in our dock area did not sell well at all, while items in our showroom were flying out the doors.

Sale Day

Our Purchasing System

Station team members with carbon copy receipt pads to assist customers. Creating orders on the floor will facilitate faster checkout. Include the customer’s name, phone number, item name, inventory number and the price.

Give the customer both copies of that receipt and the perforated stubs to carry. Do not try to stay with one customer and walk around with them. Have the buyer take the receipt and if they want to shop in a different section, a different employee can add to that order.

At checkout, cross check their receipt, tags, and anything that was being held in the front (small accessories and pillows).

Give the customer the yellow carbon copy of the receipt and keep the original. It will be important for you to have the most legible copy as you are updating your inventory. Staple the tag stubs to your copy to identify which items need to be taken out of your inventory system.

Once a large piece is purchased, mark the part of the tag still attached to the item “SOLD” with a red marker and the buyer's name. We recommend adding their phone number to the back of the tag, too.

Payment

We ran our sale on Cash, Venmo, and Cash App only. We wouldn’t recommend that…chaos. Both apps crashed the first day because someone tried to spend more than their limit and it flagged our account. Some of the sales that appeared to go through at the time, were later canceled by the app. This is another good reason to get phone numbers for each transaction, in case there is some issue.

Use Square or some other credit card system to save you from a backed up checkout line. Also, post payment signs around the sale and at the door as a reminder for your buyers.

If you do offer payment through an app, post a QR code for customers to use and have multiple team members prepared to calculate invoices and take payments. Remember to charge any applicable sales tax.

Pro Tip: Contact the app before the sale and let them know you’ll be seeing an influx of payments during the dates of sale. Trust us, you don’t want them to put a hold on your account.

Grow Your Email List

We got lots of questions asking when our next sale would be. This is the PERFECT time to use an email sign-up sheet.

“Would you like to be on our email list so you get the first word on our next sale?”

Post-Sale

After the sale, there are several options for dealing with the leftover items.

• Those that are still usable for staging can be returned to inventory.
• You could offer them to your team at a discounted price.
• Schedule a pickup time to donate to a charity at the close of sale.
• Schedule a consignment store to evaluate what they will take at the end of the day.

Pro Tip: Consignment is another great way to eliminate old inventory without going through the stress of a sale. You can typically expect to get about half of what you might get in a sale.

Nothing feels better than a good purging. With these do’s and don’ts, your warehouse sale is sure to run smoothly.

In our Cru coaching program, we talk about all sorts of topics like this. Anything that relates to your home staging business, we’re talking about it. If you want information on how you can join this group of professional stagers, click here!