The EstateSales.NET Story
EstateSales.NET is a business run by a father and son team, Dan and Micky 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 subscribers 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 subscribers could get customized emails sent to them
about upcoming sales. Subscribers 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. We saw tremendous growth during 2008 and 2009. The EstateSales.NET site was averaging between 4 and 5 million
page views towards the end of 2009.
In late 2008, they hired Nathan Kilbourn
to the Vintage Software team as the first non-family member employee. Almost a year later they hired their second employee,
Jared Strockbine. Nate and Jared have
enabled the McQuade's to get even more done with EstateSales.NET as well as a few other related sites. One that has been released
to the web (but isn't QUITE done yet) is AntiqueMalls.com. Another site that has
yet to be announced is closely related to EstateSales.NET. The Vintage team is hoping to have it released by December of 2009 January of 2010. :)
The current design of EstateSales.NET was released in November of 2009. With this new design comes a wider screen to
see even more pictures as well as many other features that make the site even better than
it was before.
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.