How To Buy & Sell Mid Century Modern On Craigslist For Profit - Vol. 1
This series will show you how to buy and sell Mid Century Modern Furniture and Decor on Craigslist for a profit. We use these techniques for buying and selling MCM, but the tips and tricks we will show you here can be applied to any niche.
Craigslist is a great vehicle for scanning items that people are selling too low and turn around and flip for a higher profit. The beauty about using Craigslist vs. buying from a Thrift Store or going to a Flea Market is the low cost of time and energy involved. With Craigslist you don't have to leave your house with out knowing exactly (well almost exactly) what you are going to pick up and how much profit you are going to make on it.
That being said Craigslist has become highly competitive with resellers and so below are the tips and tricks we recommend for beating your competition and getting the most out of Craigslist.
In Vol. 1 of this edition I'm going to share a few tricks with regards to buying items. If you have a certain type of item you think you can make money on, chances are a few other people have already been flipping said item for awhile. So how do we set ourselves apart from our competition?
1. Set Craigslist Alerts: Craigslist alerts are a great way to get notified about the items you are looking for the second they get posted. You can have alerts emailed or texted to you directly from Craigslist. To do this simply go to Craigslist and search for whatever item it is you are looking for. For this to work best don't just type in say "Mid Century Modern Credenza" and set up a search alert. If you do this you're going to get texted every 5 minutes with spam. What you wan't is to be very specific. Take a minute and describe the type of post that If you saw you would stop whatever it is you're doing and drive straight to this person and buy from them. For me it works like this. I might be able to buy a Mid Century Modern Credenza all day for $400 (speaking in generalities here) and sell it for $450 but its not worth my time to do so, so I don't want to be bugged with alerts that show me Credenzas for $400. For me I would enter my max price in the column to your left (when looking at Craigslist after you entered a search) at say $200 (again speaking in generalities for this to work you need to figure out what your time is worth). That way Im only getting notified of Credenzas where I'm going to make a decent profit on. Take a look at the left hand column and put in any info that would help you in rooting out all unwanted posts. When you are done up by the search bar you will see a magnifying glass, to the right of that is a "save search" link. If you click on that it will save the search to your account. You still have to activate it though so after you click save search it takes you to a screen that says please confirm. Click Confirm. That will take you to the screen that manages all your saved searches. Scroll down to the one you just searched for and on the left hand side is an unchecked box under alerts. Just click that and you're all done. Give it a test run of a couple weeks, if you are getting too many alerts consider lowering your parameters, too little alerts consider raising them. I have my alerts set to a special ringtone and my parameters are high. So if my phone goes off with that ringtone I know that nothing I'm doing is more important then opening that email and looking at the post someone just posted.
A good example of this is this weekend an alert went off for someone who posted a few Mid Century Modern pieces (scroll down for photos). There was a headboard with 2 built in sideboards, a dining room table, 6 chairs, a mini credenza, and a mcm light for $235 total! Where we live, after 20 minutes, a posting like this would have 15 people ahead of you by the time you called so its critical that we have alerts set up. I paid $235 and I'm going to get $600 for 4 chairs and the dining table, $200 for the last 2 chairs from the 6 chair set, $160 for the mini credenza (not very good quality) $300 for the headboard, and $75 for the lamp. Thats $1,400 in profit I wouldn't have if I didn't have my alerts set up. Again we do this with Mid-Century Modern furniture but you could apply this to any resell hustle you might have.
Thats tip 1. but there will be many to follow this so subscribe if you haven't and if you liked the article please hit the share button below.
Cheers,
MCP
