Apartment Community Garage Sale

An apartment complex can be an ideal place to hold a garage sale, whether or not there’s actually a garage. By teaming up with the other residents in your apartment community, you can create a bigger sale that will attract more buyers, and you’ll already have built in buyers showing up to your sale ― the other tenants in your apartment complex. While the process takes a little more than just picking a date and pulling all the old stuff you want to sell in the parking lot, a community garage sale can be relatively easy to organize and can make you some money, as well.

In most complexes, you’ll need approval to put together a community garage sale. Just who you need to get approval from can vary depending on the apartment complex you live in. In most cases, it’s the management company or the landlord. In Cynthia Colby’s case, she had to put together a full proposal. “I had to make a request to the Tenant Board and lay out all of the details on how it was to be handled,” she said. “Then it had to be voted on.”

Once the yard sale idea has been approved, it’s important to go a little farther in making sure that the sale is a success. Cynthia described the steps she took to make sure that not only buyers showed up to her community’s sale, but that there were also sellers taking part. “I delivered fliers door to door to see who was interested. I collected $10 from tenants who wanted to take part but had no table. I collected $5 from tenants who wanted to take part and had a table. I created the newspaper ads myself and paid for them out of the money collected, along with the signs. To those taking part, I gave out fliers with tips on having a successful garage sale, such as having enough change and bags. I orchestrated the whole sale from beginning to end, including cleanup.”

You may find that you can split the work of organizing a garage sale with another tenant, rather than having to do all the work yourself. Cynthia pointed out that many of her fellow tenants loved the idea of a garage sale, but had no idea of how to get one started.