Estate sales, garage sales and liquidations in the Coastal Bend
Finding these around Corpus Christi is harder than it should be. The good sales are scattered across three national boards, a couple of Facebook groups, craigslist and a city purchasing page nobody reads, and half of them are posted on a Thursday night for a Friday morning start. If you have ever driven out to an address and found the sale was last weekend, that is the problem.
So we are building one place for the Coastal Bend: Corpus Christi, Portland, Ingleside, Rockport, Aransas Pass, Kingsville, Robstown, Alice and the island. Sales you can browse by date, and post for free if you are running one.
See what is on this weekend
Live listings sit on our Coastal Bend calendar, with dates, addresses and hours.
Running a sale? Post it here free
There is no charge and no account. Put in the address, the dates and the hours, say roughly what is in it, and it goes on the calendar. If you are an estate sale company or an auctioneer working the Coastal Bend, post your whole schedule. We would rather carry every real sale in the area than a curated few.
The one thing we ask: if a sale gets cancelled or cleared out early, update it. A listing that sends somebody across the causeway for nothing costs you more goodwill than the listing ever earned.
Where else to look
We are not going to pretend this is the only place sales get posted, and we do not copy other boards’ listings onto ours. Here is where the rest of them are, so you can do one sweep instead of five.
- EstateSales.NET
The biggest national board. Best coverage of professionally run estate sales, thin on small private ones.
- EstateSales.org
Second national board. Worth checking because companies do not always post to both.
- AuctionZip
Auctioneer-led sales and estate auctions rather than walk-through sales.
- City of Corpus Christi surplus auctions
Public record. Vehicles, equipment and office lots. Almost nobody watches this one.
- Craigslist garage sales
Where small private sales still get posted. Noisy, but it is the long tail.
Estate sale, garage sale or liquidation?
An estate sale is a whole household being sold off, usually run by a company, usually because somebody died or moved into care. Everything is priced and tagged, the house is open for a weekend, and the good furniture goes in the first hour. This is where the real finds are.
A garage sale is a family clearing out. Cheaper, more haggling, far less predictable. Worth it if you are close by and not if you are driving forty minutes.
A business liquidation is a company closing or upgrading, and it is the one most people never think to watch. This is where restaurant equipment, shelving, office furniture, tools and vehicles come from. City and county surplus auctions fall in here too, and they are public record.
What to bring
- Cash in small bills. A lot of sales are cash only and nobody has change at 7am.
- A tape measure and your door and trunk measurements. Furniture is where people misjudge.
- Blankets and straps. You are hauling it yourself and the coast road is windy.
- A phone with a photo of the room you are buying for. Colour memory is worse than you think.
A few local things worth knowing
Coastal Bend sales run heavy on fishing and boating gear, patio and outdoor furniture, and tools. If you are furnishing a place near the water, estate sales beat retail badly on solid wood furniture that has already survived the humidity.
Check the weather before you plan a route. Garage sales here get cancelled for rain far more often than they get posted as cancelled, and an August sale that starts at 7am is effectively over by 10.
Sales across the causeway and out on the island are worth the drive on a weekend when several line up, and a waste of a morning for one. That is the whole reason to look at a list by date before you leave the house.
How this list is built. Listings come from people submitting them and from public-record sources such as city and county surplus notices. We link to other boards rather than copying their listings, because their terms do not permit republishing and because a copy of a national board is not useful to you anyway. If a sale here is wrong or cancelled, tell us and it comes down.