The EstateSales.NET Story
EstateSales.NET is a business run by The McQuade family (in the picture: Micky, Courtney, Dot, and Dan McQuade). It all started because of Dan's ability to restore old mixers (Kitchen Aid, Sunbeam, etc). Dan is a machinist by trade and would find old mixers at estate sales to fix up. He would then completely disassemble them, repair them, repaint them, and then sell them on Ebay.
Dan was going to so many estate sales, he became friends with many of the companies in the Memphis, TN area along with the people always standing in line. He began talking to them about having a site where they could list the items for sale and even have pictures so people could see what was at the sale. That way the people standing in line would know which sale they wanted to go to first. Once he had enough interest, he created MemphisEstateSales.com.
MemphisEstateSales.com was a local hit. People loved being able to see a large description of a sale along with pictures compared to the few sentences they would get from the local newspaper. During Christmas of 2001, Dan spoke with his son, Micky, about going nationwide. It was during this time that the EstateSales.NET idea came about.
Micky had been working for a company called ServiceU developing web applications. It was this experience that enabled him to develop the first version of EstateSales.NET in 2002 that could work for a nationwide audience. During this time Dan was still entering all the sales that appeared on the site. The first admin site came around mid 2004 where companies could enter sales themselves.
Features were added over the next several years and EstateSales.NET grew more and more popular in other parts of the United States besides its home town of Memphis. In July of 2005, a newly designed web site was released. With this new site design, it was easier for visitors to find the sales they were looking for. With this new release, a dramatic increase in the number of users occurred along with an increase in the number of companies that were listing their sales on the site.
In 2006, more and more features were added so that users could get customized emails sent to them about upcoming sales. Users could finally choose when to get notified about upcoming sales rather than having to receive them the day before the sales started. 2007 brought with it the need to increase capacity. Dan and Micky still run the site themselves, but it is now using multiple servers in order to keep up with the popularity of the site. Early 2007, they decided to change the name of the company from EstateSales.NET to Vintage Software. This was because they had other great web sites in mind and wanted to have one main company to list them under.
A new web site design in 2008 enabled visitors to the site to find sales that interest them even easier. There was tremendous growth during 2008 and 2009. The EstateSales.NET site was averaging between 4 and 5 million page views towards the end of 2009. (As of mid 2010, it received between 6 and 7 million page views. And now in 2015, it regularly goes above 30 million page views each month.)
A new wider design came out in November of 2009. An improvement was made to the number of pictures that could be viewed along with many other features that make the site even better than it was before.
We turned ten in 2012! We had a celebration (and a contest). Our company was up to about 15 people at the time (lots of programmers and customer support folks!).
In October of 2013, we released a new look and layout for EstateSales.NET. We incorporated the new design in order to improve user experience on mobile phones and tablets. Our site now uses a responsive design, which allows it to be viewed on almost all devices, whether you're using a huge desktop screen or a tiny mobile device.
Throughout 2015, we've been making multiple additions and improvements to our site. As of the first of September, we've implemented a company resources section, a new city sale list page design, the addition of a sale leads system to connect clients with companies, various performance improvements, updated logo colors, and a new, integrated content management system. EstateSales.NET currently has a team of 35 employees working to make the site better for estate sale companies and users across the entire US.
If you have any feedback about the above information or if you have an idea that would make our site better, please let us know.