First, you want to sign up for emails through estatesales.net. You can personalize your updates, and it’s an extremely useful means of locating the estate sales that are perfect for you.
Most estate sales run Friday to Sunday, though some are Thursday through Sunday, some just Saturday and Sunday, and some Thursday through Saturday, so make sure to check the listed dates on the sales you’re interested in. Usually, but not always, items are priced as marked the first day, 25% off the second day, and half off the final day. If you want a really excellent deal, show up about an hour before close on the last day of the sale. There won’t be much left, but what is left will be extremely negotiable – often as much as 80 or 90% off the marked price (but you have to ask).
When you see sales listed on EstateSales.net, look through the photos – they don’t always show everything in the house, but they often show enough that you can tell if a particular sale will have the sorts of things you’re looking for. What I often do is go through all the sales near me on a given day, look through the photos of the sales that interest me, and print out just the first page of the promising upcoming sales. That page has the address, dates, and times of the sale, as well as the agency running it. I enter the different addresses in this handy tool, which maps out the best route (this I learned after a few estate sale days where we literally zig-zagged across the county). I make a written list of things I actually am looking for, which helps cut down on random purchases.
You can always try to negotiate, even on the first day, but be prepared for a flat no. My theory is, if I want something but just don’t want to pay the asked price, it doesn’t hurt to see if they’ll negotiate. Often negotiable things are either really large (so most people won’t want to move it) or things like clothing, which seem to sell poorly at estate sales. Again, though, Sunday before close pretty much everything is negotiable, so give it a shot.
Ask the people running the sales about the stories. Sometimes you leave a sale with no items, but a great story. One house in Melbourne Beach had a huge (but empty) RV garage. It turned out the owner was a woman in her 90s, and her husband had died, and she’d always wanted to travel the country in the RV but he hadn’t. So when he died, she contacted the estate sale company and a real estate agent, told them to sell everything (and the house), and she took off in her huge Class A RV to see the U.S. What could have possibly come from that sale that was better than that story? (Though my son did pick up a pretty cool old sword, so …).
Happy Estate Sale-ing!