TL;DR: Most moving sales are posted 24 to 72 hours before they open, so look on Thursday or Friday night, not Saturday morning. Check Facebook Marketplace filtered to garage and yard sales, your town's Facebook buy-and-sell group, Craigslist under garage and moving sales, and Nextdoor. Arrive between 7 and 9am on the first day for selection, or late on the final day for prices. If you are the one running the sale, the second half of this page is for you.
Moving sales are the best version of this whole category and they are surprisingly hard to find.
The reason they are good is the deadline. A garage sale is someone optionally clearing out a closet. A moving sale is someone with a truck booked and a lease ending, who has to get a dining table, a lawnmower, and a washing machine out of the house by a specific date. That person is motivated in a way a garage sale host simply is not.
The reason they are hard to find is that there is no single place they get posted. There is no Zillow for this. So here is where they actually are.
Where moving sales get posted
Facebook Marketplace, filtered. Open Marketplace, go to categories, and choose the garage sale section. Set your radius wider than feels sensible, because people will drive for a good moving sale and the good ones are worth the twenty minutes. This is the highest volume source in most of the US.
Your town's Facebook buy-and-sell group. This is the one people skip and it is often the best. Search Facebook for your town or county name plus "buy sell trade" or "yard sale," and join two or three. Sales get posted here that never make it to Marketplace, because posting to a group your neighbors are already in feels easier than making a real listing.
Craigslist, garage and moving sales. Quieter than it used to be, still active for larger sales, and still the place people post when they have a genuinely full house to clear.
Nextdoor. Narrow radius by design, which makes it low volume and high relevance. Worth a two-minute check on Friday.
Signs. Genuinely. The best sale I ever went to was advertised with a piece of cardboard at an intersection and appeared nowhere online at all.
Dedicated yard sale apps exist. I have tried several and the listings are thin almost everywhere, because the sellers who would populate them are already on Facebook and have no reason to do the work twice.
When to look, and when to go
Look on Thursday or Friday night. This is the single highest-leverage thing in this post. Sales get posted one to three days ahead. If you search Saturday morning you are shopping after everyone who searched Friday.
Go in the first hour of the first day if you want the good things. Resellers arrive at seven. They have a route, they know what they are looking for, and by ten the furniture worth having is spoken for.
Go on the last afternoon if you want the prices. By then the seller is doing arithmetic between a lower offer and a Goodwill run with a borrowed dolly. Offers that would have been insulting on Saturday morning get accepted on Sunday at four.
Bring cash in small bills, and bring a tape measure. The tape measure is the thing separating people who buy furniture from people who go home and think about it.
Message before you drive, about one thing
If a listing shows something you actually want, send one message before you get in the car, and make it about measurements rather than availability.
"Is this still available" is the most ignored message in secondhand selling, because sellers get it fifteen times and it asks them to do work. "What are the dimensions on the dresser, and will you be there around 8?" gets answered, because it is a real question from someone who is clearly coming.
If you are running the sale, this part is for you
Everything above is also the map of where your buyers are looking, so here is the same information pointed the other way.
Post Thursday or Friday for a weekend sale. Not Saturday morning. The people who plan a route are planning it Friday night, and a sale that appears at 8am Saturday is invisible to them.
Put your three most eye-catching items in the first three photos. People decide whether your sale is worth driving to from the thumbnail. A photo of a full garage communicates nothing. A photo of a good dresser communicates that you have furniture.
Name your neighborhood in the title. Not your address, which you should never post publicly, but the area. "Moving sale, Hyde Park" tells someone in ninety seconds whether it is worth their Saturday. A title that just says "Moving Sale" makes them open it to find out, and most of them will not.
Post it in more than one place, with the same link. Marketplace, your town's group, and Nextdoor. Three posts, five minutes.
That last one is the part that gets tedious, and it is what I ended up building ClearList for. You photograph what you are selling, the AI writes the listings, and you get one page with everything on it and one link to share. Then posting to Marketplace, your buy-and-sell group, and Nextdoor is three copy-pastes of the same URL instead of three separate listing sessions. Buyers browse the whole sale in one place and reserve what they want, so the item is held rather than promised to four people at once.
The pieces that make a sale findable are covered in more detail in what is a moving sale, and if you have not posted yet, how to photograph items for a moving sale is worth ten minutes, because the photo is doing all of the work of getting someone to drive over.
One thing worth saying to buyers
A moving sale is somebody's bad week.
They are tired, they are behind on packing, and the reason that dining set is priced at $90 is not that they do not know what it is worth. It is that Tuesday is coming.
You will get better prices by being easy to deal with than by negotiating hard. Show up when you said, bring the right vehicle, take the whole set rather than the two chairs you actually want, and you will be offered things that were not for sale. I have watched that happen repeatedly, and it is a much better strategy than arguing about ten dollars.