Mike's NBC-TV stories

Apps to find garage, yard and estate sales

It’s that time of year when many people love to spend their days driving from one garage or yard sale to the next.

Having a plan of attack before heading out can help save time and money when searching for those treasures, and our PC Mike Wendland says these apps can help.

Yard Sale Treasure Map finds sales by day, location, distance, and keyword. Take it a step further by organizing by color and creating a sale route. Yard Sale Treasure Map even gives you the option of seeing a street view of a sale site before visiting, and it gives directions to each sale as you shop. The app is free for iOS and Android.

Garage Sales by Map finds garage, yard, and estate sales nearby. The app scours the Internet for sales and puts the resuts all in one place. It claims as many as 70,000 sales listed weekly throughout the U.S.  You can search by keyword or browse sales on a map, list or by photo. The app is free for iOS and Android.

YardZing uses more of a crowdsourcing approach to finding sales. That means users are continually feeding data, including photos, into the app so that it is up-to-date, which is useful if you want to know if it’s worth it to drive to a sale. The navigation features make finding sales easy. The app is free for iOS and Android.

Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.