I have just gone through the sale of a property in the greater Seattle area and the experience has been both exhilarating and frustrating.
What it most definitely brought home to me though, is the fact that value and perceived value is incredibly varied. Apart from the incredible pricing insanity that is currently entrenched in the greater Seattle property market, I was more surprised by the complete lack of value that people perceive in other stuff in general. Even if it is offered for free.
I have owned and lived in this property since 2003/2004 and its contents are a blend of households from the Middle East and Africa augmented with pieces bought in the greater Seattle area. Thus, the furniture, wall art, and other household effects were significant and varied. Back in 2009 when the property and job market tanked, I started putting preparations in place to liquidate the house with a view to a downsize and started by effectively emptying a lot of the contents of the house into the garage. The result was that the house was relatively empty and the garage almost failed to continue being a garage for housing vehicles anymore. Things stood like that for years.
With the momentous decision to sell in 2017, it was important to continue to purge the house and in fact, take a few more steps to really get rid of stuff. If you do this yourself, you will find that there are really only four choices open to you for household contents.
Donate, offer for free, sell or dump.
Selling is the preferred route because you get something back but the challenge here is setting a market price, advertising, fielding offers and closing the deal. You can also run a garage sale but sometimes this is such a headache in itself that people don’t want to deal with the work involved – I certainly didn’t – I considered an estate clearance agency but that would have involved work too and in the end kind of concluded that I would feel a little violated by having my discards judged by others.
Offering stuff for free is fine if you are happy to part with it, and I was, especially towards the end. Ironically people are still very fussy and picky about even the free stuff and almost expect unused, brand new and in perfect condition to be the state of things before they even consider the taking someone else’s stuff on. So this is a challenging way to dispose of stuff too!
There’s the option of donating, and here I found some options, Goodwill, Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul. Most interesting to me here was the fact that the Salvation Army couldn’t schedule a pickup for more than six weeks out and my area is not serviced by the Goodwill pick up the trick. St Vincent de Paul had too many caveats and exclusions to be even properly considered. The individual things I did take to Goodwill were like dealing with a pawn broker, even though I was donating them. There was almost this, surveyor like approach to everything I took along, assessment, tutting and then sighs. All rather disconcerting.
Finally, there is the option of a bulk waste removal company but there are two options here, straight pickup and dump or pickup and recycle. Recycling means that instead of taking your stuff to the dump, they take it to a charity like Goodwill with whom they have a contract. This is the expensive choice though, because you’re basically buying haulage and removal services. If mattresses are involved, you often incur a per item handling fee too!
I took the harsh view, that there were certain pieces of furniture, in particular, that I had no attachment to or for which the attachment was dwarfed by the burdensome and unnecessary cost of storage – these would have to go! I found that I had accumulated a significant amount of completely replaceable or disposable things too, in some instances, in multiples for whatever reason. Partial sets of this or that, appliances that were rarely used and so on.
Disposal one on one
Because I had a little time, I took advantage of Craigslist, the Facebook Marketplace and a couple of other avenues to promote my stuff online, but this required staging them, photographing them and then measuring or describing them. This is fine if you are disposing of just one or two items but it becomes an excruciating exercise when you have to do it for literally dozens of things. It became quite a lot of work.
In the end, I ‘made’ a couple of hundred dollars on some stuff advertised. This barely covered the effort involved in posting it and hanging about waiting for buyers to show up, inspect pay and haul away.
What amazed me here was the fact that buyers and prospective buyers would nickel and dime me as the seller on stuff being offered for pennies against their high dollar replacement value. I even found myself doing this, in an almost trollish way with a seller of something I was interested in, on the FB Marketplace. These behaviours really did drive home the fact that even when it comes to free, there is the replacement value, one’s own perceived value and the market’s assessed value on chattels and often the range is so varied that you would think you’re not even evaluating the same stuff.
Value surprises and unloved, loved items
I was surprised for example, that an old mountain bike I had, was snapped up and concluded that it was probably priced way too low, but that a cast iron bed and frame that I had on offer, which was actually ‘quite classy’ – elicited absolutely no interest whatsoever even when offered for free! Eventually, at relatively great expense, much of the furniture had to be picked up by a haulier and donated to Goodwill. Seeing it all go was a little disheartening because I sensed that the value I ascribed to some of the items would not be aligned with the Goodwill experts, particularly for the older pieces which I felt would have found a loving home where they would be cherished had I managed to find the correct advertising and promotion forum.
Some of the items I donated, would almost certainly have had a completely different assessed value in other parts of the world too. Particularly in less affluent countries for example where the bugbear of excessive consumerism hasn’t quite gotten a grip.
I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly that people were interested in parting with their hard earned cash for easily, in terms of secondhand stuff. I sold an espresso maker for example, with a milk frother/steamer to a guitar enthusiast who was going to use it to weirdly melt the glue to repair guitars and I disposed of a couple of whole beds with mattresses to several people for peanuts but I couldn’t even give away a dining table and chairs and a lounge suite. Part of the mental challenge for acquirers seemed to revolve around transportation since I wasn’t ready or capable of doing door to door deliveries on anything more than a chair or two. In one instance I even helped one of the bargain hunters find a haulier to do a personalised pickup and drop off. The whole transaction was sight unseen and all done with photos and PayPal, a couple of emails and text messages. For another, we did a trade. Some pieces of furniture for mandalla therapeutic massage gift certificates.
My conclusion in the end was that in the Pacific North West at least, and in the greater Seattle area in particular, second-hand stuff has almost no value or at least is very undervalued relative to replacement cost – perhaps because I couldn’t find the markets or perhaps because what I had was simply old tat, only fit for the trash heap in the minds of most.
Other trash heaps
In much the same way as all this household stuff, I see people, products and data being handled in a similar way by businesses. These things are assessed in terms of value or in some cases not assessed at all! In the case of the latter, if you have no knowledge, you have no insight and effectively the value is effectively zero. Rather sad really.
It is very easy for the value of people, for example, to be effectively devalued when you have no idea what they actually do. We should make an effort to really discern better, what people do before we make snap judgements about how much value they add, especially in the role of a people manager.
Oftentimes it seems to me that the unconsidered aspects of a person’s role. Tasks and deliverables that are not front and centre, can sometimes have a much higher value to the role and the business – they are also sometimes harder to define and replace but we should try to properly discern and assess anyway. The most forward and noisiest or flamboyant of personnel are also not necessarily the most valuable and the reticent, demure and shy types are not necessarily the least valuable.
For an interesting perspective on assessing people, take a look at one of my earlier posts on Which Banana would you choose?
Anyone who has done any product marketing, product management or business course should have learned about the BCG Growth/Share Matrix. It is an oldie but a goodie. Developed by Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group in the early 1970’s, it is based on Henderson’s observations of business unit value but it is something that can also be applied to products. The matrix is designed to help with long-term strategic planning, to help identify and consider growth opportunities and decide where to invest. Companies that fail to understand the value of their products in this kind of context, often land up starving the very pieces of the product portfolio that effectively sustain and grow the business. The matrix has its limitations but it is a good starting point for anyone considering product value factors.
Finally, there is the matter of data and its value. For a long time now, the analysts and consulting firms have been beating the drum regarding the importance and value of data. It seems that there is still an awful lot of misunderstanding or perhaps even denial in the business community of the importance of good quality data.
The only ones who really seem to get it, are those who are trying to wrangle the data into a better state or who have to personally rely on a given set of data to generate reports or make decisions with confidence. It seems there is still a lot of confusion as to just what kind of a value can be ascribed to good data versus bad data. Again, I don’t have the answers to what’s important to you or your business. Just like household effects, with the passage of time, the value of a great deal of data erodes so those contacts you acquired last year may not be as valuable today as they were when you got them.
I may have some thoughts and clues but in the end only you and your business can really draw more categorical conclusions on what is important and why and then whether what you have is any good or not.
The most important thing, is making the effort to do the analysis and then making a judgement. If you’re not even doing that, then you’re effectively stating that your data has no value at all. And that, as we all know, simply cannot be true.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn