You start to look around the house and you notice that you have quite a few things that you have collected that you now want to sell.  You know that the items are too expensive for a garage sale, and you don’t have the time to list the items for sale online.

What do you do now?

A booth in an antique mall or a flea market is a wonderful way to help you make some money and clear out some of those things that you have around the house.  There are some things that you need to know before for jump into renting a booth.

The first thing you need to do is to find the perfect place for you to set up a booth at.  This could be at a place that you love to shop at or even heard of.  The best thing to keep in mind is to see if that place has a pretty good amount of foot traffic going through it.  This will help you have more potential sales.

Another thing you need to know is if the antique mall or flea market requires you to stay a certain amount of time.  It’s rare for this to happen in the area that I live in–you can shut down the booth after just one month if you want to.

More often than not, you will need to pay for your first month’s rent on the booth.  I’ve seen the rent cost anywhere from $35 for a small booth or showcase all the way up to $300 for a large booth.

The place that you want to rent a booth at may charge you a commission on every item you sell.  You need to ask if they do, and even how much the commission is (I’ve seen it around 10% of the selling price of the item).

You might be able to opt out of the commission; the mall might charge you a little more on the rent of the booth to cover this commission.

The mall will require you to have a number—this will help the mall separate out who sold what.  This will be done the day that you set up the booth, but don’t worry—the mall will have a list of what numbers the other dealers have so there is no confusion.

A word of advice—look to see what kind of tags the dealers are using (a piece of tape may not be wanted at the mall).  One thing that I have seen a lot of is a piece of paper cut into a small square tied on with twine or ribbon.

Good luck and lots of sales to you!