The facts:
- 140 Gallon mixed reef with sump/refugium and mostly “second string” equipment
- Reason for selling: moving into a motorhome to travel the country
- Final sale value of all items: $3700 broken down as follows
o $260 for fish, eels, shrimp, crabs, urchins, serpent stars
o $900 for SPS and generally "hard" coral
o $450 for softies other than...
o $950 for Shrooms and Xoas
o $160 for live rock and sand (lots of coral sold attached to free live rock)
o $980 for equipment and supplies
- Time to sell: five weeks for the vast bulk of it
Assumptions I made in preparation for the sale:
- Full system buyers willing to pay a cut rate but still reasonable price are unicorns. I did not even bother with trying, going straight to part out sales.
- Shipping is not worth the hassle, cost, and risk for livestock, and should be a last resort for equipment and supplies for similar reasons. YMMV.
Lessons:
- Start early, it will take a while. As you need to sell items in phases, i.e., the last fish and coral have to be gone before you can even start on most of your equipment and support systems, give yourself months, not weeks, for the full process. I started July 20th and am still selling misc equipment, though the last of the livestock and big tank were gone by the five week point.
- Take the trouble to advertise right: take pictures, adjust them in post to correct color/contrast/cropping, post to your local message board and to craigslist, and keep the ads up to date. Pictures make a huge difference, especially for the coral. I have very little in the way of camera skill and I don’t have photoshop, but it turns out that most modern cameras are amazing things and even the most basic picture editor, usually free with your computer or camera, will do a decent job even for a beginner. Provide solid descriptions if the picture doesn’t give the full story, such as size, growth rate, and best tank position. And even if you have a very active local club, there are plenty of reefers out there that never check the message boards, if they even know they exist. I learned this late in the game, and unnecessarily lengthened the sale process. I had a surge of buyers from CL once I took the trouble to advertise there. My ad strategy for both RC and CL was separate sale threads for each major category of item, i.e., fish, hard coral, soft coral, equipment, and I included my phone number and direction map in the ads.
- Price to sell: Unless you are under no pressure at all, do some research on every item, coral and fish, and underprice the market. Sure, some high end items retain their value, and some coral is really hot, but generally you need to be less than half or even a third of retail price because your market audience is limited and probably your time as well. Good prices lead to a self-feeding market as word spreads, people on the fence jump in, and buyers show up at your tank and walk away with more than they or you expected. Remember, just because you can find someone in Iowa that paid $20 per polyp or 80% of retail for that esoteric piece of equipment, that does not translate to your local market producing national level results.
- Don’t dismiss the low priced buyers: when they show up to pick up the $5 item, they often leave with a lot more if you have set it up right. I had to fight against an inclination to dismiss or ignore the texts from people that wanted me to spend a lot of time explaining what I had left, send them additional pics, and negotiate prices, when all they wanted was four $2 mushrooms. But I did fight it and many of those people bought a lot of stuff once they showed up, with several coming back for a second round after pay day or spouse permission. To maximize this, be able to quickly answer questions about prices, decide in advance what sort of discount you are willing to give and under what conditions, and set up a sale table with all the misc equipment, tools, supplies, dry goods, etc that you have collected over the years.
- Make them come to you for the livestock, prefer it for the equipment, but be flexible about that last bit. Since over half my buyers purchased additional items when they showed up at my tank, I viewed it as a strong incentive to resist delivering or meeting somewhere for exchanges. But sometimes you have to give, and I delivered roughly 5% (by value) of my items to get the sales done.
- Organize your buyers. You will be fielding lots of PMs, calls, emails and most commonly, texts. Whether you go old school with a log book or 21st century with a smart phone app, you want to be able to cross reference a real name with an RC handle with a phone number with what they want to buy. In the process of closing the deal, arranging times to pick up, providing directions, and other aspects of the transaction, you will communicate a lot more than you think with these people, so why make it hard by having to look up numbers and ask to be reminded what they want every time they call or text? Consider putting every buyer as a contact in your phone with a sortable characteristic. I gave them all “Reef” as a last name. Along these same lines, keep track of the back up buyers because you will have a few people change their mind, life happens.
- Be willing to frag almost anything. I really shot myself in the foot by resisting fragging a couple of large pieces because I perceived them as difficult to frag. I missed several opportunities to sell Nuclear Greens and parts of a large, stunning maroon and electric green Favia, and in the end had to slash prices to ludicrously low levels just to get them gone. I also lost a giant 16” orange Monti Cap that did not survive the transition to temp tank. While people that buy large expensive coral are not exactly unicorns, they represent a fraction of the market looking for frags. It’s pretty understandable: people want ten $20 frags rather than one $200 colony, they might not have room in their tank for a big piece, they want to spread the risk with smaller corals, and they take satisfaction in the growth of a small frag to a large colony. The price breakpoint seems to be $50. I was able to sell only six corals for more than $60, whereas I sold four at exactly $50 and about 60 for less than $50.
- Think hard before transitioning to a temp tank. If taking down a large system, be skeptical about setting up a small temp tank to transfer the slow selling livestock and live rock into. Sure, it might give you a head start on tearing down the big tank and large equipment, but you complicate the process and unnecessarily add stressing events to the livestock. I lost a couple of very nice pieces and one fish as a result of this transfer process.
- Take pleasure in the process and your fellow reefers enthusiasm. This process will take up a lot of your time. In addition to the tedious job of removing and sorting and prepping, you will need to meet and give your attention to dozens of people. I’m hardly an introvert, but after a full day of work, some evenings I had to struggle to be in the mood to see the one, two, or three people showing up, often with families in tow, so that I could be a good host and help them decide on a purchase. I tried to put myself in the mindset of taking pleasure in their excitement and enthusiasm for the hobby that I had loved for the last seven years. I also made a bit of a game of the whole process by carefully tracking the purchases by category and seeing how close I could get to goals each week.
- No one wants your live sand. I had a deep sand bed, roughly 3 cubic feet of sand total, and I sold less than a quarter of it for dirt cheap. The $15 or so I got was definitely not worth the trouble I went through to keep it live as I was breaking down the tank. I couldn’t get to it until most of the coral and live rock was gone, and setting up a temp container with water flow was just a mess that kept my house smelling a bit ripe for a week until I finally said “Uncle” and got rid of the unsold portions.
- 140 Gallon mixed reef with sump/refugium and mostly “second string” equipment
- Reason for selling: moving into a motorhome to travel the country
- Final sale value of all items: $3700 broken down as follows
o $260 for fish, eels, shrimp, crabs, urchins, serpent stars
o $900 for SPS and generally "hard" coral
o $450 for softies other than...
o $950 for Shrooms and Xoas
o $160 for live rock and sand (lots of coral sold attached to free live rock)
o $980 for equipment and supplies
- Time to sell: five weeks for the vast bulk of it
Assumptions I made in preparation for the sale:
- Full system buyers willing to pay a cut rate but still reasonable price are unicorns. I did not even bother with trying, going straight to part out sales.
- Shipping is not worth the hassle, cost, and risk for livestock, and should be a last resort for equipment and supplies for similar reasons. YMMV.
Lessons:
- Start early, it will take a while. As you need to sell items in phases, i.e., the last fish and coral have to be gone before you can even start on most of your equipment and support systems, give yourself months, not weeks, for the full process. I started July 20th and am still selling misc equipment, though the last of the livestock and big tank were gone by the five week point.
- Take the trouble to advertise right: take pictures, adjust them in post to correct color/contrast/cropping, post to your local message board and to craigslist, and keep the ads up to date. Pictures make a huge difference, especially for the coral. I have very little in the way of camera skill and I don’t have photoshop, but it turns out that most modern cameras are amazing things and even the most basic picture editor, usually free with your computer or camera, will do a decent job even for a beginner. Provide solid descriptions if the picture doesn’t give the full story, such as size, growth rate, and best tank position. And even if you have a very active local club, there are plenty of reefers out there that never check the message boards, if they even know they exist. I learned this late in the game, and unnecessarily lengthened the sale process. I had a surge of buyers from CL once I took the trouble to advertise there. My ad strategy for both RC and CL was separate sale threads for each major category of item, i.e., fish, hard coral, soft coral, equipment, and I included my phone number and direction map in the ads.
- Price to sell: Unless you are under no pressure at all, do some research on every item, coral and fish, and underprice the market. Sure, some high end items retain their value, and some coral is really hot, but generally you need to be less than half or even a third of retail price because your market audience is limited and probably your time as well. Good prices lead to a self-feeding market as word spreads, people on the fence jump in, and buyers show up at your tank and walk away with more than they or you expected. Remember, just because you can find someone in Iowa that paid $20 per polyp or 80% of retail for that esoteric piece of equipment, that does not translate to your local market producing national level results.
- Don’t dismiss the low priced buyers: when they show up to pick up the $5 item, they often leave with a lot more if you have set it up right. I had to fight against an inclination to dismiss or ignore the texts from people that wanted me to spend a lot of time explaining what I had left, send them additional pics, and negotiate prices, when all they wanted was four $2 mushrooms. But I did fight it and many of those people bought a lot of stuff once they showed up, with several coming back for a second round after pay day or spouse permission. To maximize this, be able to quickly answer questions about prices, decide in advance what sort of discount you are willing to give and under what conditions, and set up a sale table with all the misc equipment, tools, supplies, dry goods, etc that you have collected over the years.
- Make them come to you for the livestock, prefer it for the equipment, but be flexible about that last bit. Since over half my buyers purchased additional items when they showed up at my tank, I viewed it as a strong incentive to resist delivering or meeting somewhere for exchanges. But sometimes you have to give, and I delivered roughly 5% (by value) of my items to get the sales done.
- Organize your buyers. You will be fielding lots of PMs, calls, emails and most commonly, texts. Whether you go old school with a log book or 21st century with a smart phone app, you want to be able to cross reference a real name with an RC handle with a phone number with what they want to buy. In the process of closing the deal, arranging times to pick up, providing directions, and other aspects of the transaction, you will communicate a lot more than you think with these people, so why make it hard by having to look up numbers and ask to be reminded what they want every time they call or text? Consider putting every buyer as a contact in your phone with a sortable characteristic. I gave them all “Reef” as a last name. Along these same lines, keep track of the back up buyers because you will have a few people change their mind, life happens.
- Be willing to frag almost anything. I really shot myself in the foot by resisting fragging a couple of large pieces because I perceived them as difficult to frag. I missed several opportunities to sell Nuclear Greens and parts of a large, stunning maroon and electric green Favia, and in the end had to slash prices to ludicrously low levels just to get them gone. I also lost a giant 16” orange Monti Cap that did not survive the transition to temp tank. While people that buy large expensive coral are not exactly unicorns, they represent a fraction of the market looking for frags. It’s pretty understandable: people want ten $20 frags rather than one $200 colony, they might not have room in their tank for a big piece, they want to spread the risk with smaller corals, and they take satisfaction in the growth of a small frag to a large colony. The price breakpoint seems to be $50. I was able to sell only six corals for more than $60, whereas I sold four at exactly $50 and about 60 for less than $50.
- Think hard before transitioning to a temp tank. If taking down a large system, be skeptical about setting up a small temp tank to transfer the slow selling livestock and live rock into. Sure, it might give you a head start on tearing down the big tank and large equipment, but you complicate the process and unnecessarily add stressing events to the livestock. I lost a couple of very nice pieces and one fish as a result of this transfer process.
- Take pleasure in the process and your fellow reefers enthusiasm. This process will take up a lot of your time. In addition to the tedious job of removing and sorting and prepping, you will need to meet and give your attention to dozens of people. I’m hardly an introvert, but after a full day of work, some evenings I had to struggle to be in the mood to see the one, two, or three people showing up, often with families in tow, so that I could be a good host and help them decide on a purchase. I tried to put myself in the mindset of taking pleasure in their excitement and enthusiasm for the hobby that I had loved for the last seven years. I also made a bit of a game of the whole process by carefully tracking the purchases by category and seeing how close I could get to goals each week.
- No one wants your live sand. I had a deep sand bed, roughly 3 cubic feet of sand total, and I sold less than a quarter of it for dirt cheap. The $15 or so I got was definitely not worth the trouble I went through to keep it live as I was breaking down the tank. I couldn’t get to it until most of the coral and live rock was gone, and setting up a temp container with water flow was just a mess that kept my house smelling a bit ripe for a week until I finally said “Uncle” and got rid of the unsold portions.
