How Gen Z Fell for Estate Sales
If you’ve wandered into an estate sale recently, chances are you’ve noticed a shift. Not in what’s for sale, but who’s there to shop. Once a weekend pursuit of the Boomer crowd, estate sales are having a moment among a decidedly different generation: Gen Z. Between a hearty nostalgia for a time before they were born—the ’90s and early aughts—the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing into someone’s home (like scrolling through a Zillow listing but in real life), and the rise of niche estate sale influencers in various corners of the internet, getting into an estate sale these days is something of an Olympic sport.
In Washington, D.C., where the lines to get into estate sales can stretch on for hours, the surge in popularity is thanks largely to Maddy Brannon, a stand-up comedian turned estate-sale influencer, who documents her finds in cheeky videos to her nearly tens of thousands of followers online (over 75,000 on Instagram and more than 30,000 on TikTok). Each week on her social profiles and on her Substack, Brannon posts Reels of the sales she’s handpicked in D.C. and its surrounding suburbs, walking her followers, largely Gen Z and young Millennials like her, through various homes and apartments and previewing what will be up for sale. “I’m obsessed with this,” she deadpans in one as she strolls through a sale that happens to have an unusual amount of bunny décor. Brannon’s estate sale “obsessions,” of which there are many, include peanut butter glasses, asparagus tongs, a sea anemone sculpture, a men’s vintage Polo jacket. The weirder, the more obscure, the more appealing.
It all started back in 2022 when Brannon and her husband purchased their first home, a row house, and found themselves with a surplus of space and a limited budget with which to fill it. “I just was kind of trying to figure out how people can afford anything,” Brannon says. She turned to estate sales to find deals and felt like she’d hit the jackpot. “I was shocked that no one had ever told me about estate sales,” she says. “It made me feel like it was a little bit gatekept.”
Since then, Brannon has become something of an estate sale influencer, both to residents of her city, who follow her for local sales intel, and to the prying eyes of the very online worldwide audience. And while other influencers in the niche world of estate sales rack up views by raving about things like finding a $400 Cartier Tank watch in Texas or by delighting in walking through the Beverly Hills estate sale of a former soap opera starlet, Brannon’s success is largely due to her comedic commentary. A recent sale was “giving aristocracy,” she says in one Reel, referring to a house’s Rococo vibes, while issuing a “clown warning” on another’s doll collection, and classifying a third sale as being on-trend with its surplus of gingham and wicker.
Brannon is hardly alone in her particular corner of the internet. Search #estatesale on TikTok and you’ll find over 115,000 posts. Pinterest’s 2025 Fall Trend Report notes an overall tidal wave rise in interest among Gen Z for all things vintage and in secondhand shopping, with searches for “vintage fall aesthetic” up by over 1,000 percent and searches for “dream thrift finds” up by over 500 percent.
If it seems surprising that the 20s-and-30s crowd is becoming obsessed over things like shrimp cocktail holders, silver trivets, and decorative pots, think again. It’s an aesthetic that fits right in with the rise of so-called “grandma hobbies” like mahjong and needlepoint that are increasingly finding a base among a younger generation eager to seek out anxiety-fighting modes of connection. Gen Z is, after all, the generation who made the cottagecore aesthetic a thing this summer, also according to Pinterest’s 2025 Fall Trend Report, which found searches for “Martha Stewart aesthetic” were up by 2,889 percent from last year.
At a recent Friday-morning sale in D.C.’s tony Dupont Circle neighborhood, the line to get in wrapped around the block. About 95 percent of those standing in line were women in their 20s. “There’s this girl on TikTok” and “I follow this woman on Instagram” were familiar refrains when asked what brought people to the sale. They were there for the Brannon-approved content and the promise of vintage clothing, midcentury furniture, or, at one sale, a lightsaber, but they were also drawn by the clear absence of fast-fashion brands, or the ubiquitous staple of early-20s apartments—IKEA.
For Paige Minear, a vintage reseller in Georgia who runs The Pink Clutch and is an avid estate-sale devotee, the shift in vintage shoppers has been striking. Over the past few years, her customer base has increasingly grown younger; she says she now most frequently encounters women just out of college who are eager to source something vintage and affordable. “They’ll [come into the shop and] say ‘I’m looking for two copper pieces to hang on the wall,’ and you know, up until two years ago, no one had a copper mold on their wall who wasn’t over 60,” Minear says. “But Martha Stewart has made copper very intriguing and very popular once again.”
Beyond the thrill of hunting for vintage finds and Y2K-era clothing, walking through an estate sale means “you get to see the inside of the home and see how they use it,” Minear notes. It’s also, she says, “a way to tap into creativity, and even if you go to an estate sale and you buy nothing, you have a wonderful time.”
No matter what the homes are filled with, there’s something inherently wistful about the D.C. estate sales Brannon shares. The homes are often scattered with political memorabilia—everything from a 1960s JFK coloring book to vintage NASA office supplies to matchbooks from once political hot-spot restaurants to Obama MetroCards, which are common and sought-after finds. And while a comedic approach is her default, Brannon makes a concerted effort to be mindful about what she’s showing and talking about. “It’s very easy to go into someone’s house and be judgmental about the things that they had, but I think it’s better to appreciate the sort of the stuff that people have,” she says. “I get the sense that when I capture a video of someone’s home who did important work, who were long-time State Department employees, or NASA, or the FBI, or civil rights activists, who spent their lives dedicated to a cause that seems like it was good—people feel good about it.”
But not everyone is thrilled with Gen Z’s new obsession. Longtime estate-sale shoppers, regularly going in for the hunt with little competition, now do battle with hordes of friends browsing with their matcha lattes or yoga mats, picking through racks of clothing, pouncing on vintage cameras, or ogling the furniture. “I have had older people come up to me and be like, ‘I think what you’re doing is cool, but you’re kind of ruining it for me,’” Brannon says. But she doesn’t give the criticism much thought. She’s too busy ogling an assortment of tiny fake fruits, top hats, and decorative grill scrapers and sharing it all with her followers.
In an age of disposability, fast fashion, and the addictive convenience of shopping online, Brannon has found an audience willing and eager to slow down long enough to wait in lines and sort through what others have left behind. And for that crowd, a generation raised chronically online, it turns out the ultimate scroll is through someone else’s belongings.