Savvy shoppers inherit bargains at estate sales

If you're willing to wade through the remnants of another person's life, you can find bargains at an estate sale. You just may have to knock a dealer out of the way to get to them.
Antique sellers, book collectors and EBay users show up to these events early. Often they're armed, with magnifying loupes to scrutinize figurines, research books on vintage furniture or an iPhone to check price comparisons.
The professionals are looking for the same things you are: deals. These days, estate sales -- and more prosaically named yard and garage sales, along with swap meets, flea markets and auction houses -- seem to be full of them. The slumping economy has pushed prices down, as has competition from Internet sites, a dwindling interest in antiques and furnishing trends that veer toward the sleek and uncluttered.
"It's definitely a buyer's market," says Billy Humphries, the co-owner and main auctioneer at South Coast Auction in Santa Ana. "What we were selling 10 years ago for $500 we're selling for $150 now."
Although the term "estate sale" often is used loosely, it's generally expected to mean that all the contents of a household can be purchased, minus, perhaps, items collected in advance by family members. (In some parts of the country, they're called "tag sales" because items are tagged with prices rather than auctioned off to the highest bidder).

Some people conduct partial estate sales when only some of the furniture is up for grabs. Alternatively, sellers sometimes combine merchandise from several estates in one home.

Death often prompts the estate-sale dispersal of personal possessions, but so can divorce, downsizing and bankruptcy. People empty their homes for a variety of reasons -- maybe because they've fallen in love with Danish Modern and can no longer bear anything Early American.

Then there are foreclosures.

"With the economy being the way it is, people are losing their houses," says Sanford Cohen, owner of Estate Sales Los Angeles. "I'm going in and selling the contents."

In an estate sale, the stuff of day-to-day living is usually laid out in the intimacy of a home. Sheets, skillets and steak knives. Dressers, jewelry and bone china. You might find a sweet surprise. An antique harp, maybe, or a cookie jar like your grandma used to have. Then again, you might find boxes of bras and underpants.

"Sometimes it's really high-end stuff," says Sherry Marks, a Los Angeles bargain hunter who prefers shopping on Craigslist and EBay. "Sometimes it's really garbage."