How Influencers Are Rewriting the Rules of Estate Sales

A viral TikTok tour of a powder-pink bathroom changed the trajectory of Quinn Garvey’s life. In the video, a blush-hued soaking tub like something from the Barbie Dreamhouse sparkles beneath thousands of mosaic tiles. Shag-pile carpeting, deep enough to swallow your feet, stretches across the floor. As the camera pans the room, scarcely a surface escapes the rose-tinted vision. The effect is as if a pink-obsessed Midas has passed through, leaving everything in their wake drenched in shades of bubble gum and peony.Garvey first encountered the all-pink-everything fantasy in 2024 at the dawn of her career as a content creator, when she filmed a walk-through video at an Encino, Los Angeles, home ahead of an estate sale. “I was just in awe of that bathroom. I had to take a second to make sure it was real,” she recalls of the space, which also featured seven classical Greek columns and fish-shaped taps. Viewed 214,000 times on TikTok, with a follow-up video receiving a further 3.6 million views, the clips helped cement Garvey’s reputation as one of a new generation of influencers whose behind-the-scenes previews offer followers a tantalizing first glimpse before estate sales officially open.Three days after Garvey’s preview tour, the sale, organized by the LA-based company Handled, was underway, and a line snaked down the corridor of the mid-1980s home with the pink bathroom. Visitors waited patiently for a chance to see the now-trending space in person, a sign that social media had introduced this old-school analogue world to a digitally native audience.Estate sales tend to follow the three Ds: downsizing, divorce, or death. When, in the wake of one of these life-altering events, everything must go, an estate sale is a way to sell off a large amount of furniture, decor, and art all at once. These affairs are typically held within the client’s domestic space over a couple of days. They’re often orchestrated by professional companies, such as Everything But The House, Grasons, Handled, and Treasured Estates, who catalogue and price the items, then manage transactions and crowd control during the event.Once advertised through word of mouth or handwritten posters taped to lampposts, estate sales entered the digital age in the early 2000s with the launch of major online marketplaces EstateSales.org and EstateSales.net. Suddenly, listings could reach far beyond the local neighborhood, nudging open the door to what had long been a niche corner of second-hand shopping.Pieces by Eero Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, and more at a 2023 estate sale held in a 1962 Dike Nagano designed home in Hollywood attended by Garvey. Courtesy of Quinn GarveyMemorabilia, scrapbooks, art, and more for on display at the estate sale of actor and Holocaust survivor Robert Clary, in his 1968 Charles Du Bois designed home. Courtesy of Quinn GarveyThen came the pandemic. Estate sales proved surprisingly resilient, continuing in various forms under new restrictions. At the same time, a captive online audience developed an insatiable appetite for the voyeuristic thrill of sifting through other people’s stuff. As influencers began posting videos from estate sales held inside time-capsule homes, often with celebrity connections or untouched vintage interiors, the scene exploded.The hashtag #estatesale has now clocked up 675,000 posts on Instagram and 153,000 TikTok videos. Spot a queue outside a house on a Sunday morning, especially on the West Coast, and chances are they’re not waiting for froyo—an estate sale is taking place inside, and it’s likely already been leaked online. Depending on how you look at it, influencers have either democratized a market once reserved for dealers, who shared insider tips by word of mouth, or turned estate sales into just another viral attraction.An early pioneer of the trend of sharing estate sales online is Macy Eleni, author of Second Chances: The Ultimate Guide to Thrifting, Sustainable Style, and Expressing Your Most Authentic Self and a thrifting influencer with more than half a million followers on TikTok. In 2020, she posted her first estate sale video. Within 24 hours, it had racked up a million views. “That video took off and people went crazy. My followers were like what is this? Why is Macy in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills, shopping old Dior sweaters? It blew people’s minds that these sales existed,” she says.Unlike Garvey, who has turned estate sale content into a full-time career, Eleni isn’t paid to showcase sales. Her motivation comes from being first through the door. “I like to show my audience cool stuff,” she says, which translates to views, likes, and followers. Being invited to film sneak peeks of sales before they publicly open has its advantages. “It’s better to film when there aren’t a ton of people around who might not want to be on camera.”Eleni says a combination of sustainability-minded Gen Z followers, the joy of discovering one-of-a-kind finds, and the Old Hollywood glamour of Los Angeles homes has created the perfect storm. “Pretty much all my estate sale videos go viral. It’s attracting a lot of younger people; it’s now a completely different demographic of people standing in line to how it was in 2020.”Amy Jones, who runs an online retail business called I Luv Lucite, has also noticed this shift. Jones began sourcing from estate sales around six years ago, building a lucrative business reselling retro furniture and decorative objects. In the glory days, wins included scoring an Art Deco Revival console mirror from the 1980s for $50, which she later sold for $500 to a prop buyer who used it in the show Euphoria. At another sale, she camped overnight in her car to snap up a Hollywood Regency sofa in emerald velvet, bought for $300 and resold to an adult entertainer for $3,000.Then, around 2022, Jones noticed a new crew with sharper elbows showing up. “That was the beginning of influencers posting about estate sales and things have changed drastically since,” she says. Alongside the longer lines came rising prices. “If an influencer has mentioned the sale, prices might hike up by maybe 60–80%. You might now be buying things for the same price as you’d pay in a nicely curated store. It doesn’t seem fair as people are doing the dirty work, waiting in the long lines, and digging through things, then paying full price.” Jones is now more likely to source bargains from Facebook Marketplace and thrift stores. “The hole in the wall that looks like it’s about to collapse and is run by someone’s grandma? That’s the place!”The moment influencers discovered estate sales during the pandemic was also when Timothy Burkhart, owner of Dial M For Modern, a Chicago store specializing in restored original American and Danish midcentury-modern furniture, decided to step away from the chase. The timing was no coincidence. “The estate sale organizers got really greedy, even outpricing online sellers and it just seemed like a rigged game. I’ll never understand the influencers wanting to blow up the sales. I guess they get paid to do so but for dealers it definitely takes a toll in the long run.” Dealers, he says, often spend years cultivating sources and relationships to acquire pieces, only to be priced out of the game. “There’s no secrecy anymore. If I occasionally pop into an estate sale now it’s to look at a cool artist or architect’s home. That’s the fun part, just seeing the spaces.”“I get it,” sympathizes Garvey, whose greatest hits include a video of the Mrs. Tom Petty estate sale in 2025, where everything in the Malibu home sold during the three-day event. “Estate sales are a special experience for the vintage community, that you want to keep close. But also, someone has passed, the collection needs to move on, and the house needs to be sold. I don’t think you can gatekeep these things forever.”As estate sales become increasingly polished and social media-savvy, navigating the tension between visibility and sensitivity can be a high-wire act. Amy Byer, founder of Handled, says presenting a deceased person’s belongings as cool and desirable requires careful judgment, particularly when their loved ones may still be in a haze of grief. When she launched her luxury-leaning company in 2018, Byer drew on her background in entertainment to present estate sales in a more editorial, image-led light—an approach she says clients appreciate because it honors the history behind their possessions, rather than simply listing them for sale.At the time, most items were presented online with amateur photography, sometimes shot on a digital camera with the timestamp still visible. “Then I had this house that was so cinematic, it looked like a Scorsese set,” she recalls. Byer brought in Annabelle Sadler, a photographer and videographer who has shot for the likes of Vanity Fair. “I hired her and the sale was bonkers; it looked sexy and aspirational. It’s really about telling a story and celebrating the client’s collection.”Fittingly, Byer was an early adopter of the influencer preview model and has also granted early access to celebrities. There are specific examples she can point to where reels have led to deals—like the time a 13-year-old spotted one of Garvey’s preview TikToks featuring a signed Herb Ritts photograph of Madonna, and promptly persuaded his mother to attend the sale and purchase it.Ultimately, it’s a numbers game, Byer says. “It’s about bringing the estate sale to as many eyeballs as possible, and after that I can’t predict what’s going to happen. We’ve had 500 people, which is wonderful and also stressful, but all I need is 30 really serious buyers through the door.”Unfortunately, when it comes to the homes being emptied, sometimes even online fame isn’t enough to save the day. The pink bathroom in Garvey’s breakout video was later gutted by a developer and replaced with a white cube interior, prompting online outrage and a comment of dismay from singer Madison Beer.Unfortunately, after the estate sale ended, the bathroom was demolished. Courtesy of Quinn GarveyThe space is now immortalized on Garvey’s social media accounts. Courtesy of Quinn GarveyGarvey, who describes herself as a passionate preservationist, says her documenting of estate sale homes is about more than driving attendance and making a buck. “For fans of design and interiors, I feel it’s important to document homes like this,” she says. The bathroom’s three-person tub, raspberry-hued bidet and chandeliers of rose-quartz-colored shells may no longer exist in physical form, but they’ve at least been granted a second life online.“That bathroom was such a loss,” she says, “but I’m glad people got to experience it through the estate sale. It should be known that a bathroom that pink and carpeted really did once exist.”