Make a Neighborhood Garage Sale Map

Coordinating a neighborhood garage sale — be it large or small — is not an easy project. However, there is one important task that can be easy: making a neighborhood garage sale map. A map will ensure you and your neighborhood close out the sale with the most payoff. Bargain hunters will have access to all the information they seek in one place and they’ll easily be able to navigate your sale.

While a neighborhood garage sale map certainly makes it easier for buyers, it also makes it easier for sellers to make a profit. A neighborhood garage sale map you share on social media or even embed on your website can draw more savvy second-hand shoppers to your sale, increasing the odds your stuff sells. For all its benefits, it can be hard to believe any organizer of a neighborhood garage sale wouldn’t utilize a map. Putting together a neighborhood garage sale map is likely the easiest task of the whole project. Just gather the garage sale location data you probably already have, copy and paste into a customizable map, and you’ll be able to share it with the world!

View Neighborhood Garage Sale in a full screen map

Gather Your Garage Sale Data

The first step in making a neighborhood garage sale map is gathering your data. If you are the person in charge of your neighborhood’s garage sale or you’re sharing the coordination duties, you likely already have all the stops of the neighborhood garage sale noted somewhere.

You’ll want to move your data into a spreadsheet if it’s not already. Perhaps other organizers put all the locations in an image. While this makes sharing on social media easy, it adds one step to the map-making process. If you have all the garage sale locations in image form, the simplest way to move them into a spreadsheet is to use a JPEG to Spreadsheet converter. If you have the locations in a document, you can skip the image conversion and simply copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet. 

Easy Image to Spreadsheet Conversion

JPG image of garage sale addresses

A tool like Easy PDF’s OCR converter will have your image data converted into a spreadsheet in no time. Just upload an image that includes locations of the garage sale and it’ll be converted to an Excel file to use with Excel or with Google Sheets for a more collaborative option. We’ll show you the minor adjustments you may need to make to the spreadsheet in a bit.

Document or Notes App to Spreadsheet

Perhaps instead of an image, you have a list of addresses of neighbors shared in an email or a community forum. Or, perhaps they’re in a Word Document or other place where you store notes. That data can be copied and pasted into your spreadsheet of choice. You’ll need to make some adjustments to get it to the correct format, but doing so won’t take much time at all.

The Best Spreadsheet Format for a Map

You’ll want to have your spreadsheet sorted into at least one column: an address column. This column is what we will use to map the points, so you’ll want to be sure it contains only addresses. If you’d like to specify a city, state, or country, add those in as separate columns.

Example of a great spreadsheet

An optional column you can add is a short description of each garage sale. Say each household participating in the neighborhood sale has let you know the specific things they’ll be selling. You can add that information to its own column to help buyers discern the spots they’d like to hit. You may also decide to add a numbered order column. This can give garage sale goers an idea of how large the neighborhood sale will be or make it easy to say “meet me at garage sale #27”. BatchGeo can also create numbered markers for you via Advanced Options > Label each marker.

You can also make it so map viewers have the ability to sort your map by the different categories of garage sales. This will allow treasure seekers to more easily hone in on the sales most up their alley. To do so, assign each location in your spreadsheet a category. For example, if you know one garage sale will mainly sell furniture and household items, you can add a column to your spreadsheet and assign this garage sale “Home goods”. Keep categorizing each sale so that when you make your map, it will be sortable by category.

Make and Customize Your Map

Once your data is in the best spreadsheet format for a map, all there’s left to do is map it! To ensure you accurately plot each and every sale, stick with a mapping tool that uses parcel geocoding instead of the less accurate interpolation. Our mapping tool uses the preferred method. Just copy and paste your data into the tool, and you’ll be able to move on to the fun part: customizing your map.

As our Introduction to Map Making on the Web tutorial highlighted, BatchGeo allows you to customize your map design and map markers. For map makers, you can choose from seven marker colors for the free version of BatchGeo and 10 marker colors with BatchGeo Pro. In both versions of BatchGeo, you can select from one of three marker shapes. To further customize your map, BatchGeo offers you the choice of five base map styles. Pick the one that stands out the most to you!

Share Your Map with the World

Now that you’ve finished making a neighborhood garage sale map that contains all the information a bargain hunter could ever need and more, it’s time to share your completed map with the world!

You can share the map to your Facebook page, Twitter, or Instagram, or other social media sites. To share a public or unlisted map on social media:

You can even embed your map into your website, or really, anywhere. We also have the option to make your map a mobile map, which will help your bargain hunters to easily identify where they want to go on the day of the sale. Wherever you wish to share your neighborhood garage sale map is up to you, but wherever you want to share it, BatchGeo makes it easy.

BatchGeo’s mapping software allows you to easily and accurately plot each and every sale of a neighborhood garage sale, no matter the size. Our users love that the maps they create with BatchGeo are customizable and totally shareable, as you can see:

Make your own neighborhood garage sale map today or check out how we make use of our mapping tool for other maps like building a Google Maps store locator without code.