Advice on selling large aquariums and equipment quickly

kaxt

Member
So I need some advice/suggestions. Long story short, my good friend had an awful experience with a tenant renting an apartment from her. He's in jail now, leaving her with a completely trashed apartment. Here's where Reef Central comes in- there is a ton of aquarium equipment and large fish tanks in the apartment that she needs to get out so she can gut the apartment and get it ready to rent again.

There is a 240 gallon reef ready tank that is empty. A 90 gallon that is set up with live rock, and a fully equipped sump, and looks like it might have been running when the tenant got arrested many months ago. There is an empty 75 gallon, a brand new 40 breeder with stickers still on it, and what I believe is a 29 gallon that is also set up and full of water. There is a big Bubble Magnus skimmer, an AquaC skimmer, a bunch of Eheim pumps, heaters, canister filters, media reactors, UV filters, and T5 light fixtures. I'm guessing there is some other random equipment that I missed also. I know that most of the tanks hold water, because they are full of funk water, but I haven't tested any of the equipment.

My friend doesn't have any aquarium knowledge and asked me to come check it out and let her know what she should sell and what she should just trash. In my opinion all of it needs to be cleaned, but none of it is garbage. She is loosing money on rent and needs to get this stuff out. I would love to take it off her hands, but I just upgraded tanks a few months ago and don't have any use for the majority of what she has at this moment. I also don't have room to store it.

How would you go about selling these tanks and equipment? I'm tempted to just put a low ball price on everything and say 'must take all' but I'm guessing there aren't many people who are willing to come pick up five tanks, especially because the majority of them are large. I also had the idea to advertise an auction and see if I could get a bunch of people to show up and take the best offer on each piece, but that seems like a ton of work, with a good chance of failure. My friend lives an hour from the apartment and I live 40 minutes from it, so I'm not looking to just selling everything individually and have to show up every time someone is interested in purchasing something- especially since it's not that unusual to get blown off by people from craigslist.

What do you think is the best way to sell all this quickly, without just giving it away? I'm hoping selling this equipment helps her mitigate some of the cost of getting the apartment back in good shape. Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post.
 
As you stated, I would do a all or nothing sale. Don't part it out. Let the buyer deal with the headaches of having stuff he can't get rid of. Let it be known up front and don't waver.
 
Get rid of anything alive, get a storage unit near the property owner and put it inside. Then you can give her rough estimates of what every piece is worth and let her haggle it out with craigslist folks while still being able to rent out the apartment. Storage units are cheap enough it shouldn't hurt profits assuming you can sell the items in 1 or 2 months.
 
Finding a LFS is a good idea, I'll look into that, but there aren't many in the area and they tend to be small.

The problem with getting a storage unit is the 240 gallon is an 8 foot glass tank, and my friend and I are both women who drive smaller cars. So that gets into finding a lot more people to help move it and renting a truck and all that fun stuff as well. The other tanks look like they just got unplugged months ago when the tenant got arrested so it would also involve a lot more time on my part to break tanks down and clean them out, vs getting a buyer to at least help break them down. Still an option, but not my first choice.

I'm leaning towards selling everything together, or at least breaking the parts down into a couple strong systems and saying a buyer has to take all parts for that system.

Thanks for the ideas, keep them coming if you have them.
 
sale

sale

first of all ,,not sure of laws but can she sell the previous renters stuff ...
I would price out the 240 tank rate it out of 1 out 10 ...and drop the price to less then 50% and all or nothing deal ... someone looking for the 240 will jump at the tank and like u said take everything that is the unit ..
or just list all the equipment and deal with the slow process of parting out stuff , go over there and help her price the stuff to a fair value .. u can tag everything for her to what the value is and give her a number to let it go .. say the tank is worth 800 ...some one says 600 take it ....
just a idea .good luck
 
+1 on the systems. That's too much for an all or nothing deal, so you should break it down into more manageable portions. The 240 gallon tank would probably be best to sell on its own unless there is equipment that really can't go with any of the other tanks. Just sort it out by size and just match tank to sump, and equipment to tank as much as possible.
 
Maybe donate everything to a reef club with a 503 c status for educational purposes or a raffle and use this as a tax right off or split the sales 50:50 with the club at a frag swap.

She doesn't have to do anything, no headache, and recovers something.
 
first of all ,,not sure of laws but can she sell the previous renters stuff ...
I would price out the 240 tank rate it out of 1 out 10 ...and drop the price to less then 50% and all or nothing deal ... someone looking for the 240 will jump at the tank and like u said take everything that is the unit ..
or just list all the equipment and deal with the slow process of parting out stuff , go over there and help her price the stuff to a fair value .. u can tag everything for her to what the value is and give her a number to let it go .. say the tank is worth 800 ...some one says 600 take it ....
just a idea .good luck

I do not agree with this. The big tank is worth some money, but I highly doubt that it is even a third of the total value of everything. Skimmers can cost just as much as the tank, plus then there is lighting (if there is any). If they take the time to split it into about 4 sales, then they should be able to get a good price and get rid of it all within a week or two is they are pricing it correctly.
 
#1 - make sure you can legally take possession of his stuff. This might require a court filing/lawsuit for the rent, then offsetting the rent against the contents of the rental.

If you want to sell it quick, it is going to go cheap most likely.
 
Personally If I saw an exceptional deal on a large tank and had to take the whole lot then I would.

As far as price on the whole lot it really depends on how bad the unit owner wants to get rid of it and the unit rented out again. I have bought foreclosed houses before. Some things got set in the yard with free on it and a lot of things went into a roll off dumpster. Time is money.
 
You could try posting in your local club forum here on RC, if it's busy enough I'm sure you would be able to get some local help with this.
 
The guy hasn't paid rent since April. My friend has spent months trying to negotiate with him and they finally ended up in court. The official ruling was that he had until the end of last month to have someone clear his stuff out and then after that date she could change the locks and do what she wanted with any remaining stuff. So she is now the legal owner of everything.

I love the idea of donating to a 503c club. I'll have to run that by her.

ezerasurfr, I'll talk to my friend. It would be awesome to have someone take it all in one swoop. Feel free to send me a PM with an offer also- she doesn't have a clue what the stuff is worth, and yesterday afternoon was the first time I saw what she has so I haven't had much time to research and think about an asking price.
 
So it turns out that the big tank might be 300 gallons, not 240. I didn't have a tape measure when I went so I was just estimating the dimensions. The tank is 8 feet long, and I'm guessing the ends are 30x24 which would make it 300 gallons.

Here is a pucture.

The glass and seems look to be in good shape. The paint on the back and bottom is starting to peel a little and should probably be redone. I believe there is one hole in each overflow (it's hard to tell because the overflows are full of bio balls and I couldn't check from the bottom because of the furniture dollies) and there is one hole on the bottom between the two overflows. There is acrylic siliconed to the glass overflow boxes to block the view of plumbing, but the acrylic is starting to come off the silicone. With a little work this could be a very nice tank.

Any one have an idea of what it's worth? There are not too many big tanks on Craigslist that I could use to judge a fair price.
 
It's tough with big tanks like that. It's worth a lot but often people have them up for really cheap because of how limited demand is for them. I think $1000 is a fair price.
 
1000 is steep for the tank only Used. Like someone said if trying to get rid of quickly you need to price it to move. I've bought and sold for a long time problem is that it's a niche market inside of a niche market. And a 8' tank takes up ALOT of room and is way too heavy to move around. If I were her I'd take first reasonable offer that recoops her money from the apartment.
 
Honestly I would offer her $400.00 for the entire lot and offer to have it gone by Saturday.

Is it a low offer? Yes.

Does it solve one of her issues? Yes.
 
I'm going to try and break things down to sell, but I'm also going to post the entire lot together. This is a video showing all the equipment I have for sale. The Bubble Magus skimmer is sold but everything else is still available. Do you think $1500 for everything including the 300 gallon tank is a fair price? Oh, and I checked the measurements- the tank is 300 gallons.
https://youtu.be/Brbi0VcAyPg
 
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