A few months ago, I received a call from a lady who had found me through the internet. She lived out of state and was the personal representative for her brother who had passed away in Colfax (a small town just down the road from me). According to the woman, her brother had collected things for decades, and had left a double wide trailer full of “old stuff” about which she knew nothing.
I made an appointment to meet with her at the trailer the following Friday. I explained that all she had to do was to keep those things that she wanted, and I would purchase everything that remained, leaving the trailer empty, clean and ready to be sold.
The day before our appointment she called me to cancel. When I asked her why she had changed her mind, she explained that the neighbors wanted to buy the trailer and would even take everything in it if she knocked a little off the price. When I explained that it was reasonable that someone buying a trailer might want the purchase to include the appliances and furniture, but not all the miscellaneous personal property, she said ” No, they want it all” (this is when the bell should have gone off).
POSTSCRIPT: A couple off months later I was talking to a friend of mine that does auction sales, and he told me that he had just had one of the best sales in his 30 years in business (over $100,000). The funny part he said, was that all of this great stuff had come out of a trailer in Colfax!