Building Keepstead, in the open

Every few weeks in the Capital Region, a family finishes packing a house — a Loudonville colonial, a Niskayuna mid-century ranch, a Troy brownstone that's been through three moves already — and looks at what's left. Good furniture. Real rugs, real art, the pieces nobody wants to just haul to the curb. The options for selling it were always the same two: a Facebook Marketplace thread that turns into forty low-ball messages and a few no-shows, or a full estate-sale weekend, which is a lot of production for a handful of pieces.

We kept coming back to the idea that there should be something in between — curated enough that a buyer trusts what they're looking at, light enough that a seller doesn't need to hire anyone to use it. That's the whole idea. Everything since has been building toward it, in view, rather than behind a launch announcement.

We're publishing this instead of a generic "About Us" page because it's the same standard we're asking sellers to hold to — no polish standing in for the real, specific detail. So rather than tell you we "care about trust," here's what building this actually looked like, in order, with the numbers that were true when we wrote them down.

We chose a name and checked it — against New York's business registry, against the domains still open, against the marks someone else had already claimed — before we let ourselves get attached to it. We measured the market instead of assuming one: about 70,000 households across the towns we're starting in, counted town by town, not pulled from a pitch-deck slide.

We pulled up every competitor's own published fee page — the open marketplaces, the consignment shops, the estate-sale outfits — and checked our numbers against theirs, line by line, because a fee claim you can't back up with someone else's public pricing page isn't a claim, it's marketing. And we set the number sellers actually see: 85% kept, always, a flat rate, not a teaser that changes once you've signed up.