Our clients often cannot understand why nobody wants to buy their heavy, dark wood furniture. And who can blame them, really? They see IKEA furniture and know this furniture is poorly made, that the materials are manufactured, and that it will not last. Their heavy furniture, by contrast, is made to last forever, and the proof is there to see. They still have it.
They are right on all these points, but the sad truth is that when you go to buy furniture these days, you have many options. You can buy things for very low cost at a place like IKEA, you can spend a little more money to buy something nicer from a place like West Elm, or you can spend even a little more money for something from a place like Room + Board. These stores make shopping fun and easy. Alternatively, you can do it all from home, without changing out of your pajamas.
Or you can spend your weekends scouring antique shops, flea markets, and auctions, looking for just the right piece. You can spend hours driving to estate sales, yard sales, and flea markets. Then, when you find just the right thing, you may need to have it refinished or re-upholstered. And you will have to arrange to move it to your home. This is time consuming and expensive. Some people love to do this and consider it a hobby but, sadly, most people do not.
Most people, when faced with the choice between buying something new or sourcing something vintage, will choose to get something new. And we have become accustomed to replacing most of our belongings after a few years anyway, so we don’t need to worry if they are not constructed to last for a long time.
Because we all have lots of options for buying new furniture, the market for used and vintage furniture is poor. There just aren’t enough buyers out there to sustain high re-sale prices.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard an older client tell us that their furniture is valuable but their kids and grandkids “just don’t want it.” They often seem surprised and annoyed by this. We have had clients tell us that their kids and grandkids are wrong to reject the furniture they want to bestow upon them.
People from our grandparents’ generation bought a bed when they got married and used that bed every night for sixty years. When they died, their kids would happily take the bed for their homes. But today we think of purchases as being more short-term. We do not expect to have a piece of furniture forever. We expect to have it for a while – maybe while we are renting a particular apartment or living in a particular city. We are accustomed to moving with some frequency and leaving behind anything we can’t easily take with us.
And we are much more inclined to make purchases based on trends in the market. We see a new sofa we like in our price range, and we do not hesitate to replace our current, functional, sofa with it.
And so we have this imbalance: more nice old furniture available than people want to buy. And just like the stock market, the used furniture market can be fickle. The price you can sell used furniture for is dependent entirely on how much people want to pay you for it, and has nothing to do with how much you originally paid for it.
It used to be much easier to sell or donate antiques. When we started the business, we worked with some dealers who bought in bulk. They would pay our clients to take everything from their home, often bringing multiple trucks and a large crew to haul it all away. But little by little these businesses closed or left New York. It was just too hard to sell the heavy furniture.
We have had a number of clients get annoyed with us for telling them we can’t sell their antique armoire or the table their ancestors brought over from Europe several generations ago. It makes me sad to share this knowledge. I hate being the bearer of bad news like this. But there’s nothing I can do about it.
We try to remind our clients that they didn’t buy the furniture as an investment. They bought it because they needed it. We are often able to donate a lot of this furniture, but our clients really want to sell it. It’s almost as if they want to make sure that they got a good deal when they paid for it fifty years ago.
When I started this company years ago, I had no idea that helping clients accept that we can’t sell their furniture was going to be one of the hardest parts of our work. It’s a sad conversation for both of us. Donating furniture seems like a great alternative option to me, but to our clients it is often not much better than disposing of it. They get depressed knowing that nobody would pay for something they value. I understand this and I wish there were something I could do for them but, unless trends change pretty dramatically, the reality of the re-sale market is just depressing.
