Hundreds of unlike things from one home, a closing date somebody already set, and heirs who’ll read the settlement line by line. Hammerwerks is built for all three.
An estate is everything a person owned — the kitchen drawers, the garage, the jewelry box, the shelf of books — and it usually has to be cleared by a date somebody already set. Cataloging is where the days go. This is the part Hammerwerks is built to speed up.
Send a scoped, no-login link and whoever’s walking the house with you — a hired photographer, a family member, your part-time cataloger — shoots lots straight into your workbench from their own phone. No seat to set up, no password to hand around. It’s a link you revoke the moment the house is catalogued.
From the photos, the AI drafts a title, description, category, condition, and a value range — each with a confidence score. A second AI checks the draft. Then you approve every lot. It saves the typing, not the deciding — on a whole-house estate that’s the difference between clearing it in a weekend and dragging it across two.
A dresser one lot, a box of paperbacks the next, a car in the garage, Grandpa’s silver. The workbench asks what matters per category and looks up the identifier — VIN on the car, ISBN on the books, the maker’s mark on the silver, UPC on sealed goods. Used items get checked against NHTSA and CPSC recall data, so the drop-side crib never makes it to the block.
No sale gets scrutinized like an estate. The heirs knew what was in the house, they remember Mom’s ring, and six weeks later somebody questions the commission. The answer isn’t a better argument — it’s a signed contract nobody can move.
The executor signs the consignment agreement electronically and you countersign. The signed document is fingerprinted and the whole signing is recorded — so if anyone ever asks, you can show the terms haven’t changed since the day it was signed. It’s tamper-evident and provable, not a handshake you have to remember six weeks later.
When the sale closes, Hammerwerks builds a statement for the estate — every lot with its hammer price, the commission, and the net. And it settles against the signed agreement, so the rate on the statement is the rate the family agreed to. Commission and fees can’t drift between the walk-through and the check. When an heir questions a number, you hand them the terms and the math that follows from them.
A whole-estate job you run end to end and a standard consignment down the road don’t have to share a commission rate. Set it per seller and every statement follows it — no re-keying, no second ledger for the estate that runs different.
You don’t want to hand an estate a check before the buyers have actually paid, and you don’t want a shoebox of receipts when the 1099s come due. Hammerwerks carries the money from the last hammer to the year-end forms.
Pay the estate by check or electronically and record it against the sale. The rule Hammerwerks holds: it won’t let you pay out a lot before the buyer’s money for it is collected — so you’re never fronting a family payout on an invoice that hasn’t cleared. Partial payouts settle on the funds that are actually in.
Every sale reconciles — money in from buyers equals what you paid the estate, plus your commission and premium, plus tax, plus what’s still owed. See how much estate money you’re holding at any moment, and export the whole ledger to a spreadsheet whenever your bookkeeper wants it.
When the year closes, pull a per-consignor 1099 worksheet and a sales-tax remittance report instead of rebuilding the numbers out of a receipt pile. The tax scramble that used to eat a weekend is just there.
You decide, lot by lot: relist it to your next sale, return it to the family, donate it, buy it back yourself, or mark it no-sale. Nothing gets stranded, and the disposition is on the record — so the family can see where every item ended up.
No — and it won’t pretend to. AI can’t reliably grade or authenticate jewelry, coins, or fine art from a photo, and it can’t price a thin market with no comparable sales. When it’s out of its depth it says so — you’ll get “no estimate” instead of a made-up number that burns your credibility the moment a buyer knows better. Those were always the lots you were going to price yourself anyway.
We don’t claim that, and we won’t — whether a contract holds up is between you and your own counsel. What we can stand behind is what the software actually does: the signed agreement is tamper-evident and provable. It’s fingerprinted, the signing is recorded, and you can show later that nothing changed. That’s the honest version, and it’s the part that matters when a payout gets questioned.
Honestly, no — not the way HiBid or Proxibid can. Their registered-bidder pools are huge and ours is small; if raw reach is the whole game, they win it. What you get here is your own branded bidder site and a bidder list that stays yours — export it any time. Run the estate as an online-timed sale or a live sale with a clerk; buyer’s premium and sales tax are handled either way. Our edge is the workflow and owning your list, not the size of the crowd.
Yes — that’s what the capture link is for. Hand it to as many helpers as you need and they all shoot lots into the same workbench from their own phones, no login to set up. It’s scoped and revocable: treat it like a key you hand out for the afternoon walk-through and take back that evening.
No commission on the hammer, ever, and no per-bidder fee. You pay a flat monthly tier by how many lots you run — Solo $99 (200 lots), Growth $299 (1,000), Scale $799 (5,000), 50¢/lot above that — plus a one-time $499 setup that’s waived with a promo code. 30-day money-back, and you can export all your data any time.
30-day money-back if it doesn’t save you time on your first sale. Cancel anytime, and your data exports whenever you want it.
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