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The estate sale inventory checklist

The whole arc of a sale on one page — the pre-sale walkthrough, a room-by-room capture order, a fill-in inventory template with condition grades and example rows, pricing and staging, the sale day, and the settlement statement the family signs. Copy it, or save it as a PDF, and walk the next house with it.

Open the printable checklistOpens a clean, chrome-free page — print it or save as PDF. No email, no sign-up.

Estate and probate rules vary by state, and some items — firearms, certain collectibles, and anything tied to the estate’s legal settlement — carry their own local requirements. This checklist is general trade guidance, not legal advice: the executor and the estate’s attorney decide what may be sold and how the proceeds are handled.

Hands tying a kraft price tag to the arm of a mid-century chair, a phone resting nearby.

1Pre-sale walkthrough checklist

Before a single item moves, walk the house once with the family and lock down access, safety, and what is off the table.

Secure and verify access: keys or lockbox code, the alarm code, and a working way in and out. Confirm the power, water, heat or air, and every light works — you cannot photograph or run a sale in a dark, cold house.
Photograph every room before you touch anything. This is the before-state record: the house exactly as the family left it, time-stamped, room by room.
Flag the high-value pull-asides for research or appraisal — jewelry, coins and currency, firearms (note and follow local law), art, and paperwork or documents. Pull them aside and lock them up before the crowd arrives.
Note the hazards and the no-sell rooms: structural issues, pests, biohazards, and any room the family has excluded. Mark them so no one on the crew stages or sells out of them by mistake.
Agree the family’s keep-list in writing before you start — what stays, what is already promised to a relative, and what is not yours to sell. Both sides sign it, so a missing heirloom is never a your-word-against-theirs argument.

2Room-by-room capture order

Work top to bottom and clean-to-dirty, so grime and heavy lifting land at the end and never track back through rooms you have already photographed and staged.

Attic and top-floor storageDust settles downward. Clear the highest, dirtiest storage first so you are not carrying grime back through finished rooms later.
Bedrooms and closetsSmall, high-value, and quick to catalog while you are fresh — jewelry, watches, handbags, and linens hide here.
Living and dining areasThe anchor pieces — furniture, art, and display cabinets — set the tone and the top prices the rest of the sale hangs off.
Kitchen and pantryHigh item count, low value each. Batch it: photograph sets and lots together rather than logging every spoon.
Basement, garage, and shedHeaviest, dirtiest, and most tools and bulk — leave the mess and the muscle for last, once everything upstairs is done.

3The inventory template

Eight columns that follow an item from the walkthrough to the settlement. Grade condition against the fixed key — grades are consistent where adjectives are not — and fill the sold price as items clear, so the gross is just the sum of the sold column.

A Excellent: Like new — no visible wear, complete, and works perfectly.
B Good: Light, honest wear; fully functional. The everyday-antique standard.
C Fair: Visible wear, a chip, or a working flaw — priced to move.
D Poor / parts: Damaged, incomplete, or sold as salvage, scrap, or a project.

Room	Item description	Qty	Condition	Research flag	List price	Sold price	Notes
Living room	Mid-century walnut credenza	1	B	Yes — check the maker’s mark	$220	$185	Buyer negotiated on day two
Living room	Pair of brass table lamps	2	B	—	$45	$45	Sold as a pair, rewired
Bedroom	14k gold band ring	1	A	Yes — weigh and appraise	$180	unsold	Held back for appraisal
Bedroom	Costume jewelry lot	1	C	—	$30	$22	Boxed lot, priced to clear
Kitchen	Cast-iron skillet	1	B	—	$25	$25	Seasoned, no cracks
Garage	Cordless drill with charger	1	B	—	$40	$32	Tested — runs and charges
Garage	Assorted hand tools	1	C	—	$35	$30	Bin lot, sold whole

Example rows with illustrative prices — not a real estate. Replace them with your own.

4Pricing and staging day checklist

The day between cataloging and opening — price it, tag it, stage it, and shoot the after-photos.

Price the research-flagged items first. The appraisals and maker’s-mark pieces set the ceiling; everything else prices around them, not the other way around.
Put a sticker or a tag on everything. Nothing hits the floor unpriced — an unpriced item is a negotiation you have already lost.
Stage like with like: lamps with lamps, linens with linens, tools on the bench. Shoppers buy what they can find and compare, so group the categories and face them out.
Photograph the staged rooms. This is the after-state record — proof of how the sale was set and priced, and the bookend to the before-photos you shot on the walkthrough.

5Sale-day checklist

Doors open. Keep the money honest, the floor moving, and the record clean.

Set the floats and payment before the first knock: starting cash counted by denomination, your own card reader or app tested, and a written note of what you accept.
Post your markdown schedule where shoppers can see it. Many companies run day-two discounts to clear the floor — decide your own approach in advance and put it in writing so the crew answers every "will it come down?" the same way.
Mark every item sold as it leaves — the moment it is paid for, not at the end of the day. Mark-sold discipline is the only reason the settlement foots when the sale is over.
Run door counts and security: a greeter at the entry, eyes on the high-value table, one way in and one way out, and the pull-asides locked until they are paid for.

6Post-sale settlement fields

The sale is the easy part. The accounting is what the family remembers — and what earns the next referral.

Gross sales — every item that sold, summed. This is the number the whole statement is built on, so it has to match your marked-sold list to the dollar.
Commission — your percentage per the signed contract, applied to the gross. State the rate on the statement; never leave the family to work backward from a lump sum.
Fees and expenses — cleanout, advertising, credit-card, hauling, and disposal, itemized line by line. A bundled "fees" total reads like a hidden charge; an itemized one reads like a receipt.
Net to the client — gross minus commission minus fees, computed, not guessed. This is the figure the family cares about, and it should foot cleanly from the lines above it.
Unsold disposition — what happens to what did not sell: donate, haul, or return, agreed with the family and backed by donation receipts where they apply.
The settlement statement the family signs — every line, down to the net, on one document. It is the closing artifact of the job, and the thing they hand the next family who asks who to call.

Open the printable version to save as a PDF →

How to use this checklist

An estate sale inventory is not paperwork for its own sake — it is how you turn a full house into a priced, defensible, accountable sale, and how you hand the family a number they trust at the end. This checklist gives you the whole arc: the walkthrough, the capture order, the template, pricing and staging, the sale day, and the settlement. Here is how to use it, and why each piece earns its place.

Shoot the before-photos before you touch a thing

The single most valuable ten minutes of an estate sale happen before any item moves: you walk the house and photograph every room exactly as the family left it. Those before-photos are the record that protects everyone. When a relative calls three weeks later certain that a ring "was on the dresser," you are not defending your memory against theirs — you have a time-stamped photo of that dresser on the day you arrived.

The before-state record does two jobs at once. It builds trust, because the family can see you documented the house before you had any reason to move anything, and it protects you from disputes, because a photographed room is a room you can account for. Pair it with a keep-list both sides sign, and the two most common estate-sale arguments — the missing heirloom and the "that was supposed to stay" — mostly stop happening. The families who hire you again are the ones who felt handled, and nothing signals handled like a house that was photographed before it was worked.

Grade condition; do not describe it

The fastest way to slow an inventory to a crawl is to write adjectives. "Lovely vintage lamp, some wear but really charming" tells the next person nothing and takes ten seconds you do not have across a thousand items. A condition grade — A, B, C, or D against a fixed one-line definition — tells them everything and takes one keystroke.

Grades beat adjectives because they are consistent and comparable. Every "B" means the same thing to every person on the crew and every shopper who asks, so pricing gets faster and fairer: a B credenza and a B dresser sit in the same tier, and you are not re-litigating "good" versus "very good" on every tag. Grades also travel — a buyer reading your list knows what C means without seeing the item, and a settlement reviewer can see at a glance why the D lot went for salvage money. Write the grade key once, put it at the top of the template, and hold the whole sale to it.

Let the template carry the sale from tag to settlement

The inventory template is the spine of the job. Room, item, quantity, condition grade, a research flag, list price, sold price, and notes — those eight columns follow an item from the moment you photograph it to the moment it clears the floor. The research flag is the quiet hero: it is how the gold ring and the signed print get pulled for appraisal instead of getting a $20 sticker slapped on them in the rush of setup.

Fill the list price before the sale and the sold price during it, mark items sold the instant they are paid for, and the settlement writes itself from the same rows — the gross is just the sum of the sold column. This is the whole reason estate sale software exists: to take the walkthrough photos, draft the priced list you review, and roll the marked-sold items straight into the settlement, so nobody retypes a single line between the tag and the check. Whether you run it on paper or on a screen, the discipline is the same — one list, filled once, that becomes the accounting.

The settlement statement is your closing artifact

Anyone can run a sale. What separates a company from a garage sale with a sign is the document you hand over at the end: a settlement statement that shows gross sales, your commission at the contracted rate, itemized fees, and the net to the client, footing cleanly from one line to the next. It is the professional’s closing artifact — the thing the family reads at the kitchen table and remembers long after they have forgotten which Saturday the sale was.

Make it itemized and make it foot. A bundled "expenses: $600" invites suspicion; a list — cleanout, advertising, card fees, hauling — reads like a receipt and ends the conversation. Show the commission rate, not just the dollar amount, so nobody has to reverse-engineer it. And when an item is tied to the estate’s legal settlement, remember the boundary: you record and report the money, but what may be sold and how the proceeds are distributed is the executor’s and the attorney’s call, and it varies by state. Get the accounting right and the settlement statement stops being paperwork and becomes your best advertisement — the clean, signed proof that the next family should call you too.

Skip the retyping — the list becomes the settlement

This is exactly what TagLot does with the checklist above. Photograph the house room by room offline, and TagLot drafts the inventory — titles, categories, and a suggested price with its reasoning — for you to review and adjust. Mark items sold on sale day, and the settlement statement builds itself from the same list: gross, commission, fees, and the net the family signs. We record the money. We never process it.

Start free See a sample settlement

Frequently Asked Questions

What should an estate sale inventory include?

At minimum: the room, a short item description, quantity, a condition grade, a research flag for anything that needs appraisal, the list price, the sold price, and notes. Capture the room and the before-photos on your walkthrough, grade condition against a fixed key rather than with adjectives, and fill the sold price as items clear so the settlement foots from the same list.

Is there a free estate sale inventory template?

Yes — the full template is on this page, with example rows and a condition-grade key you can copy, or you can open the printable version and save it as a PDF. No email, no sign-up. Fill in your own rooms, items, and prices and it is ready for the walkthrough.

How do you price items for an estate sale?

Flag the unknowns for research or appraisal first — jewelry, coins, art, and anything with a maker’s mark — and price those before the rest, because they set the ceiling. Grade every item’s condition on a consistent A-to-D scale, group like with like so shoppers can compare, and tag everything before the doors open. Deciding a markdown approach in advance keeps the crew consistent when buyers ask if a price will come down.

What is a settlement statement in an estate sale?

It is the closing accounting you hand the family: gross sales, your commission at the contracted rate, itemized fees and expenses, and the net paid to the client, plus what happened to anything unsold. Make it itemized and make it foot cleanly from gross to net — it is the document the family signs and the professional’s best proof that the job was handled right.

Do I have to inventory and photograph everything before an estate sale?

You do not have to log every teaspoon — batch low-value sets and lots as single lines. But photographing every room before you touch anything, and pulling high-value items aside for research, is what protects you from disputes and earns the family’s trust. For anything tied to the estate’s legal settlement, the executor and the estate’s attorney decide what may be sold, and the rules vary by state.