Fine Estate Liquidation, Inc.

Dear Estate Liquidators,

I know you want the stuff; the big treasure - the find. But if you ever stop caring about the people who call you, and sort only for what they can do for you, and not what you can do for them - you will be missing the point of why clients call you in the first place.

They call because they need service. They call because they are confused. They call because they have trouble. They call because they need your help.

The day you forget this, is the day that bells will toll the decline of your business.

Two Clients I saw this week:

The Gun Collector:

In a middle class suburb of San Francisco, my partner and I went to see a man, who we were told by his step daughter, had a collection of 800 antique Colt pistols.

We were very excited on the way there. We imagined that we were about to discover the mother load of antique firearms. Here is what we found instead: An interesting collection of 80 Colt Commemorative Black Powder pistols. They were nice. They had value, but they were not the mother load of Colt pistols we had been led to believe would be there – so big deal. It is what it is. Your clients have what they have, and at least for me that is OK.

Here is some back ground about this client. A few months ago this client and a woman where driving on his motorcycle when a bee distracted him and he lost control of his motorcycle. He was severally injured and his passenger was killed.

The man we were talking too about his stuff was still bandaged, confused, and full of remorse. Because he was still confused he tended to ramble a bit.

Estate Liquidators this is not the time to push for the consignment. This is not the time to try and buy. This is not the time to become impatient. This is the time to listen and offer compassion.

What we found out was that this man was fascinating. Will we do business? I don’t know, we might; only time will tell.

The Caring Daughter:

In 1986 a woman for reasons not completely known to me put all of her things into a storage locker in a little place called Livermore Ca.. She paid her monthly storage bill for 21 years. I got a call from her daughter about a week ago. The daughter told me that her plan was to ship her mother’s possessions to the old Alameda Naval Air Station which has now been converted to civilian purposes.

Her husband had a connection to one of the business’s there. She told me that her mom was a collector of glass, silver and antiques. She also told me that there had been an appraisal done before her mom had put everything into storage that stated the value of her possessions to be worth over $20,000.00. She wanted to know if I could help her find the best way to liquidate this property. I said that I could.

When I got there, what I saw was a lot of average household furniture and accessories. My client was surrounded by half empty boxes and furniture. As a side note she had broken her wrist the day before and searching through her mother’s boxes with this impairment was painful. Here is what she said at least three times in a row. “I just don’t know what to do.”

I looked around at her boxes, the furniture, her mother’s lifetime of accumulations and I knew that there was not $20,000.00 worth of personal property there. I also knew that there was not much that I could do for her. The financial value wasn’t there. There was no real fee to be made.

My first advice to her was for her to donate her mom’s things and then go back to Los Angeles where she lived. Then I remembered a small regional auction house not far from the Alameda Air station that would probably be happy to receive this consignment of property. So I gave her the name of the company and I even called them on her behalf.

Here is my point:

The treasures we seek as estate liquidators will come. We just don’t know when or where or from whom they might come. Treasures happen when we are consistently of service to our clients.

So begin today by accepting your first treasure – the gratitude from clients to whom you have given compassionate service.

My name is Martin Codina and I an estate liquidator who loves my job.

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

Here is an email I received last night from the man who asked me to research his “Picasso Painting” click on the link to read that post first and then read Mike’s email.

Hi my name is Mike,

My wife and I are the one’s who inherited the Picasso painting. Wow we were very excited, when we read Picasso’s signature. I just knew we had something. I made a lot of phone calls, asking around.

I met this art dealer he took one look at the painting and said it’s the real thing. Before I even knew what was going on, he and his lawyer had a contract they wanted me to sign giving him a large percentage of the sale (RED FLAG).

I started looking around on my own. After talking to a number of people I met Mr. Martin Codina, best move I ever made. He seems to be a man who loves’s his work. It’s not about the money (all the work he did for us never charged a cent) it’s all about the find.

When we found out the painting was a copy Martin, was as disappointed as we were. We learned a lot from Mr. Codina. He’s not just an estate liquidator; he treats you as a friend. I have a lot of respect for him!!!

Mike

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

Genuine Picasso?

As I have written before, “Who has a better job than an estate liquidator?”

On any given day who will call, from what part of the country, referred by whom?

What will they be asking about? It’s different every day. That’s why I am so excited when the phone rings.

Two weeks ago a man called me from a state near California. He said that he had a Picasso painting and that he had been referred by a friend. After talking with him for 10 -15 minutes, I realized that if he was talking to me, that he had already spoken to too many other people.

I don’t know all the details about how many dealers and art experts he had spoken with. What I do know, is that he had an art dealer calling him everyday, who was perfectly willing to take the painting on consignment, and then bring the painting down to L.A. He also had an attorney hounding him.

Folks, Picasso’s don’t grow on trees. Finding an undiscovered painting by him is surely rare. But stranger things have happened, consider Teri Hortons’s discovery of a Jackson Pollock in a thrift store, or Donald Scheer finding a copy of the Declaration of Independence tucked behind an old ratty painting.

So when someone calls me saying they have a Picasso I listen. I treat their claim with respect and I begin a process of methodical discovery.

Here are a few of the steps I took:

1. The first thing I did was ask the paintings owner to stop contacting “art experts” and dealers all over the country. I explained that he was “muddying the waters”. That if he really did have a genuine Picasso he was hurting his chances to sell it by contacting so many people.
2. I outlined a reasonable and calm approach to authenticate the painting. I talked with him about the distinct probability that we would have to hire an authentication expert at some point.
3. I made an internal company plan.
4. I discreetly checked with a few colleagues to determine if my plan was sound.

The value of even a cheap Picasso painting is in the millions. The owner of this painting is a woman who had inherited it from a friend, the man that I had been communicating with was her husband. I wish I could tell you his name and some of the personal things we talked about, but I can’t. I will say though, that he is a good man, full of hope and dignity.

I did everything someone in my position would do:

1. I scoured the internet.
2. I checked with a print expert to determine if the image had ever been reproduced.
3. I found the one person in the world who could authenticate Picasso’s work.

The above three efforts yielded very little useful information about the painting that this couple had; I knew that I could not contact Picasso’s authenticator until I had more solid evidence that this painting was genuine. That’s when I started to make plans to go down to the Stanford Library in Palo Alto Ca. you see they have a Catalog Raisonné .

The morning of my trip down to Palo Alto I did some research trying to find out where in the many Stanford Libraries I could find Picasso’s Catalog Raisonne and that’s when I got my big surprise. I found a website put together by Dr. Enrique Mallen called The Online Picasso Project. And there was the painting I was searching for. The true original is hanging in the Worcester Art Museum, in the state of Massachusetts.

Oh well.

The hardest part of the project was calling my client and informing him that his painting was not an original Picasso. It’s always tough to deliver disappointing news.

My name is Martin Codina and I am an estate liquidator who loves his job.

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

Eduard Gaertner

I would like to tell you a story. About a year ago I got a call from a “little old lady” living in a small modest home in Antioch California. She had saved one of my mailings for several years and was now ready to act.

She and her husband were getting on in years; they couldn’t take care of themselves as well as they had in the past, so they were “downsizing”. This accomplished, they were then going to move across the country to live near their daughter in North Carolina.

Let me back up a bit. I have been in the estate liquidation business for 11 years. I have two central themes for how I am with a client and their “stuff”.

1. From the time a client first calls me, to the conclusion of our business, I am there as an advocate for my client. I never let my desire for profits cloud my advice to them, even if that advice directs them away from my business.
2. I visit almost everyone who calls me because I am certain that a wonderful surprise awaits me. I know that I am in the surprise business. It is because of this philosophy that I have had many “Antique Road Show” type moments.

I arrived at her house mid-afternoon after a long drive from San Francisco. She and her husband lived in a single story house surrounded by a proverbial picket fence. Nothing about the house or the neighborhood suggested wealth. I met this elderly couple at their front door and they showed me into their dining room where they had carefully laid out their “treasures”, silver, china, some figurines, collectibles and a few small paintings.

I wish that I could tell you that I was excited by what I saw. I wish that I could say that I immediately saw a treasure. But I didn’t. What I thought I was looking at were some higher end items – things of value to be sure, but not treasures.

I looked at each item they had – in fact all of the furnishing in their house. I didn’t see anything remarkable and I told them so. I advised them that they did not have enough to do an estate sale. My suggestion was that they either choose to have me do a buy out or have me place their items in an auction.

Their choice was to have my company Fine Estate Liquidation, Inc. place their items in an auction. So after signing a consignment agreement I went to work researching her personal property. The silver and other collectibles turned out to have values that I expected, and they did nicely at auction.

It was the small paintings that was the big surprise. It was by Eduard Gaertner (1831); after I did the research on the painting I realized that this couples’ painting had some value. The auction house where I placed the painting agreed, they placed a pre-auction estimate of $5,000 to $7,000 on it.

So imagine my surprise when several months later I got a call from a representative of the auction house. He wanted to let me know how the painting fared at auction. Auction house’s usually send you a written statement. In the 11 years I have been in the estate liquidation business I have never had an auction house call me with the results of an auction. He informed me that this little painting (aprox. 14″x20″) had sold the day before for $240,000.00. Incredible. When the auctioneer hammered this painting at that price he also set a record for a work by this artist in its size range.

So here are some morals to the story:

1. Never assume that your “stuff” is just a bunch of “junk”
2. Hire professionals – they offer ways to make better informed decisions.
3. Treat everything like it could be a treasure until the marketplace proves otherwise.

My name is Martin Codina and I am an estate liquidator who loves his job.

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

Joaquin Maria Nin-Culmell was the brother of Anais Nin. One day I got a call from the executor of his estate. She wanted to know if I would be interested in doing a buy-out of what remain of her uncle’s estate. We made an appointment to meet for the following week.

This particular executor because she was sophisticated and knowledgeable had done everything right. (Go to www.finesf.com for ways I can do this for you)

She had already secured and properly placed all photos and papers that had any connection to Anais Nin.

Because Joaquin was a semi famous composer his library of books, manuscripts, and sheet music had been carefully placed with a rare book dealer.

Even his piano was gone.

I bought what was left of his estate; his fairly ordinary furnishing and knick-knacks. But hey, how many people can say that they once owned an Eames chair that Anais Nin might have sat in.

Here are two personal things I learned about Joaquin:

1. He collected rhinoceros figurines. (I still have a few of them in my collection)
2. He loved his sister; because of his sense of history he had preserved the bulk of her literary estate many years before.
   

My name is Martin Codina and I am an estate liquidator who likes his job.

415-235-7238

http://www.finesf.com/

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

Silver Coins Found In A Barn!

Don’t throw anything away:

About 3 years ago I got a call from a fiduciary in the Palo Alto area. She wanted to know if I could come out and look at the contents of an old barn. Yes there are a few old barns left in dot com ville Palo Alto. There was a small house and a barn on the property, both of which were to be demolished to make way for someone’s new dream home.

This particular fiduciary was smart; she had received marketing material from my company and had taken one of its central tenants to heart, namely “Don’t throw anything away”.

You see the barn had two rooms above it filled with boxes and boxes of “stuff”. So you are asking what kind of “stuff”? Well to the untrained eye it looked like trash; a lot of trash. So much trash that it would eventually fill a 30yrd debris box.

Here is what a normal realtor, attorney, fiduciary or heir would have done with the barns contents; throw it all away. They would think: “there’s nothing here”, “I don’t have time to sort through this mess”, “I am going to call a hauler and be done with this now”.

And who could really blame them. Upstairs in those two rooms covered in a thick layer of dust, littered with rodent feces, and cob-web streamers draping the walls and ceiling was a lot of junk. Or was it really junk? Did these two barn rooms contain any surprises?

That’s what this fiduciary wanted to know, and that is what she hired my company (www.finesf.com ) to find out.

So here is what happened:

My team and I started our sorting process at the entrance to these two rooms. We meticulously went through each box. The contents of the boxes revealed a lot of anecdotal history about their now deceased owners’ lives. They had been in the notions business. They liked to read. They were sentimental, and had kept many small mementos from their past. Also, one of them kept a large secret from the other. I am not sure if it was the husband or the wife that kept this secret.

The secret:

It took all day to find the secret in the last room of the two rooms above the barn. In the corner of this room overlooked until the very end, was a small 5gal galvanized garbage can with a lid on it. I went over to the corner and grabbed it thinking, here is something else to throw away. When I lifted the can from its handle, the first thing I noticed was that it was very heavy. I literally thought that it must be filled with stone. But it wasn’t stone I found when I lifted the garbage can’s lid. In the can were coins! Silver coins, which were worth a cool $10,000.00

It pays to hire a professional to protect your interest: the fiduciary was happy, the heirs were happy, and I was happy – after all who among us doesn’t like a surprise?

My name is Martin Codina and I am estate liquidator who likes his job.

Fine Estate Liquidation, Inc.

415-235-7238

http://www.finesf.com/

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

It takes a particular type of person to be successful in the estate liquidation business. You have to know how to be with people first. Every one who calls me is in some stage of transition. So I have to wear many hats:

1. The Listening Hat: If you do not have patience or the willingness to sometimes listen to your client’s entire life story, try your hand at some other part of the antique business. Personally, I like to listen to people talk about themselves. I find that my client’s stories and memories teach me more about antiques and collectibles then any guide book.
2. The Risk Hat: Every estate sale or buy-out that I do has risk. Is there enough value in the estate to justify its time requirements on my company (www.finesf.com ), and if I am doing an estate buy-out, am I paying too much – will I be able to recoup my investment, and make a profit?
3. The Therapist Hat: People have troubles. They call me or some one like me to help them resolve the way other heirs or family members are in conflict about what is the best way to distribute a decedents personal property. You have to know how to creatively solve their problems.

Here are some ways I used these 3 hats today:

A woman who lives in Sonoma, Ca. called me today. She wanted to know if I would be interested in 11 old clocks that she had for sale. I said sure, and I made an appointment to see her. When I arrived at her apartment, the first thing I noticed was the stale air of a cigarette smoker. She wanted $2,500.00 for her clocks. The best one of the lot was a Gustav Becker wall clock with a resale value of about $1,200 - $1,500.00. The other 10 clocks were mostly vintage banjo clock’s from the 1940’s, which at an estate sale might bring a total of $1,000.00.

The Listening Hat: I listened to her, and I asked her a few questions, and what I discovered was that she needed this precise amount of money because her son was in a child custody battle with an ex who has a drug dependency issue. This client was trying to raise enough money to cover her son’s legal fees. She was a good mom, who had a good son.

The Risk Hat: I looked at her clocks very carefully. I thought about the many different ways I might sell her clocks; in an estate sale, or maybe sending them to an auction. What I determined was that there was no way I could sell these clocks for more than her asking price. This meant that I could not help her by buying her clocks.

The Therapist Hat: No matter what a person’s station in life is, they are all human, and as humans, they deserve to have their dignity preserved. So here is what I did. I gave her my time. I listened to her and I cared about her, and her dilemma. I explained that as a dealer I could not pay her what she needed; and then I mapped out a strategy for her, which would enable her to sell her clocks via classified advertising.

My Name is Martin Codina, and I am an estate liquidator who likes his job.

415-235-7238

http://www.finesf.com/

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide

The interesting world of the estate liquidation business:

Estate Liquidation is one of the more unique jobs that one can have. It is a back stage pass to the greatest story never really told. In theater, there is something called the fourth wall. It is the imaginary wall made of thin air that separates actors from their audience.

Each of us has a wall like this in our homes. It is what divides our private space from our public space. Since childhood we have been taught not to enter this private space. We learned that we are never to go into their drawers, closets, or bedrooms unless we are invited.

Very few people ever get this permission. One such person is the estate liquidator; some one like me. My name is Martin Codina I founded Fine Estate Liquidation 10 years ago (www.finesf.com)

Everyone that calls me has a problem. They’re moving, downsizing, retiring to a home, or they have suffered the terrible loss of a loved one dying. What are they to do with all the excess “stuff” in their homes? Who do they call? Who do they trust to go behind the scene with them and help them decide?

My job is to help them come up with rational solutions to the kind of problems they never have had to face before; accomplish for them, something few people have had the training to do.

I am an estate liquidator and I like my job.

415-235-7238

http://www.finesf.com/

The Do it Yourself Estate Sales Guide