BY 6:45 A.M. ON A SATURDAY MORNING, 40 PEOPLE ARE ALREADY ON THE outside a brick colonial in Buckhead, coffee cups in hand, a few of them filming vertical video for an audience that won’t see it until lunchtime. Somebody’s phone catches the porch, the signs, the staff handing out numbers. This is what an estate sale looks like now—part transaction, part content—and it’s nothing like it used to be. Sara Schenck MacKarvich has built a business on adapting to the changes.
MacKarvich owns Certified Estate Sales, an Atlanta-based liquidation company that has been in business since 2010, with well over a thousand sales under her belt. What’s changed most in the last few years isn’t her process, it’s who’s standing in that line.
Estate sales used to be the territory of dealers and older bargain hunters who knew where to look. Now it’s Gen Z, and the shift shows up in the numbers.
Secondhand shopping has grown into a market worth tens of billions of dollars, and younger buyers are driving a meaningful share of that growth, chasing quality over convenience. Well-made vintage furniture holds up in a way new furniture often doesn’t, and with tariffs stretching out shipping times and prices, a solid mid-century dresser has stopped being a nostalgia purchase and started being the obvious one.
TikTok has turned the hunt itself into a genre, with people previewing sales and filming their finds. “No brick-and-mortar store can replicate the urgency that an estate sale inherently brings,” MacKarvich says. “People are looking for well-made, high-quality furniture at a good price. Many shoppers would rather have something preloved than something from a big-box store, and estate sales are where they hunt and gather.”
More attention brings more crowds, and more crowds are exactly where today’s estate sales tend to fall apart. Anyone who’s stood in one of those lines has a story about it: shoving at the door, one prized item and 50 people who want it, a seller overwhelmed by a crowd nobody planned for. MacKarvich has spent years engineering that chaos out of her sales. “I run a really tight ship,” she says. “Recently, we had over 400 people in line, but we had tents up with chairs, water and Gatorade, and we had adequate staff. Everyone’s on the same page, and we give continual announcements. People are patient when they know what’s going on. No matter how many people show up, we can handle it.”
The same instinct shapes how she deals with single items that draw outsize attention. A hot collectible (and gold) always creates a problem if 50 people line up for one piece. One person walks away thrilled, and 49 walk away annoyed. Rather than let it turn into a scramble at the door, MacKarvich pulls those pieces and moves them through auction or a private sale, so the item finds the right buyer without a crowd standing around watching someone else win.
A newer, louder version of that same impulse is showing up online, and MacKarvich has that under control too. Live selling has exploded over the past couple of years, a format that started in China and moved west through apps built for exactly this. Someone holds up an item and buyers bid or shout yes or no in real time. The pace is slower in this country, but the idea hasn’t changed, and it’s caught on with resellers and even pawn shops. Anyone can run one, whether or not they know what they’re holding.
MacKarvich acknowledges live sales are part of the new order, though she doesn’t allow it until the last day of the sale. On the final day, outside live sellers are welcome to come through like any other customer, buy at posted prices, then resell to their own audiences and ship them out afterward. Giving some leeway to the trend gives pieces that might not otherwise sell one more shot at a home but on more tranquil terms.
Real estate agents have become some of her steadiest referrals. Agents routinely tell sellers to declutter before listing, which usually means paying a professional organizer to box things up before the house even hits the market. MacKarvich thinks that’s backward. “I don’t want the client paying an organizer to pack up things we could sell,” she says.
Her team goes in early, boxes and labels everything that’s part of the sale, and moves it out of the way so the house looks clean and ready to sell. From there, a family has two paths. They can list the house empty or staged and hold the sale afterwards or let MacKarvich run the sale first so the house hits the market already decluttered. Either way, nobody moves the same box of belongings twice, and the agent gets a house that photographs the way it should.
Figuring out what a lifetime of accumulated possessions is worth still comes down to judgment built over years, not an app, even in an era when a phone camera can identify almost anything. MacKarvich uses pricing tools, including AI tools like Google Lens, but won’t lean on them unquestioningly. “AI can help us be more efficient, but we rely on personal experience,” she says. “AI can be very wrong and cost the client thousands of dollars. You need a human with experience to make sure it’s correct.”
Even a sale’s ZIP code can shift what a piece commands, and for genuinely rare items, she taps a network of specialists and auction houses, sometimes shipping a single piece across the world to find the right buyer.
Her advice to anyone just starting this process is simple: Don’t throw anything away, and don’t box things up for Goodwill before someone with a trained eye has looked at it. What reads as clutter to a family can be worth thousands to the right buyer. For anything genuinely sentimental, keep it, since no sale price makes up for regretting something irreplaceable. For everything in the gray area, she sets a minimum. If it sells, everyone’s happy. If it doesn’t, it goes home with the family.
That care comes from somewhere personal. MacKarvich has been through the process herself, and it shapes how she reads a room full of strangers sorting through someone’s life. Some clients who hold a sale are almost giddy, ready to trade a house full of stuff for a smaller place and a new chapter they’ve been waiting years to start. It’s harder for others to imagine people they’ve never met handling things that used to mean something to them. MacKarvich knows the difference between a family that’s excited to let go and one that’s just trying to survive the day.
What doesn’t sell doesn’t go to a landfill. MacKarvich has kept a 10-year relationship with a men’s addiction recovery program that collects everything left over the day after a sale ends, sells it through their thrift stores and uses the proceeds to fund recovery work. Last year that partnership helped fund recovery for 31 men. Even broken furniture gets repaired and given a second life.
By afternoon, the line outside that Buckhead colonial has thinned to a trickle. Half the house is empty, and someone’s TikTok from that morning has thousands of views. Somewhere, the family is relieved to discover that letting go didn’t have to be as hard as they thought. MacKarvich’s advice for anyone facing that same mountain of stuff is the same as it’s always been: Don’t rent the dumpster, and don’t spend a weekend hauling things to the curb before you call her. “We’d rather you call too soon than not soon enough,” she says. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
