While estate sales can be found right across the country, Los Angeles is a particular hotspot. On any given weekend, as many as 100 sales crop up in the city, Champagne explains, adding that she and Warr currently live in Las Vegas but drive to Los Angeles often for the rich pickings.
The duo has been known to hit 15 sales in a day, reselling their finds on the live-auction site Whatnot. “I don’t dilly dally. I’m in and out quickly,” Champagne says with steely determination. She uses EstateSales.net, EstateSales.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist to track down events, adding that while many sellers take card or Venmo, cash is king when it comes to haggling.
“People who work in Los Angeles’s entertainment industry are often so consumed by their work that they never had families or children,” she notes. “When they pass, their belongings are often seized by the state and liquidated.” It’s turned the city into a treasure trove for collectors.
This is also a place where appearances can be deceptive, so don’t write off a listing just because the house seems unremarkable in online photos. With so many properties belonging to industry insiders, it’s not uncommon to slide open a closet and discover a bedazzlement of twinkling Bob Mackie costumes, left behind by a colleague of the legendary designer.
Staggering under the weight of our haul, we head to the next estate sale, held in a producer’s home. Printed TV and movie scripts, including the Mad Men pilot signed by its creator Matthew Weiner, are laid out on the front porch of the rinky wooden house.
“I’ve been to estate sales outside Los Angeles, but there’s really no comparison,” Warr says as we leaf through a dusty pile of Technicolor lifestyle magazines from the ’60s. “There’s just more history here, so you find all these time-capsule homes.”
Each neighborhood in La La Land has its own unique charms. “Echo Park and Silver Lake have a lot of older musicians, so it’s good for picking up instruments,” Warr says. Beverly Hills? That’s the place to scoop antiques from the ’30s and earlier. Orange County is awash with Disney memorabilia, while the San Fernando Valley is where the movie studio workers reside. Celebrity sales often occur in Bel Air or Malibu, where, in 2025, fans of the late singer Tom Petty were allowed to roam his Mediterranean-style estate, nabbing everything from bath towels to a casserole dish once used by the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.