Used power tools are about as safe a category as flipping gets. The brands are household names, buyers trust them, and the good ones barely lose value. But the exact same listing can be a clean $150 or a $20 mistake that lives in your garage, and the difference is usually three or four details you either catch in the photos or you don't. Here's what I check before I bother replying.
Stick to brands people already own
Cordless tools sell fastest when the buyer already has batteries for that system, because then they're just buying the tool. In the US the safe bets are Milwaukee M18, DeWalt 20V MAX, Makita LXT, and Ridgid, with Ryobi moving fine at the cheaper end. Store-brand and no-name cordless stuff is a slog to sell. The battery only fits that brand, and nobody's invested in a brand they've never heard of.
Corded and bare tools are fine to flip too, just price them for what they actually are. A photo of a drill with a charger and two batteries is a different animal from the same drill sold by itself, and buyers know it.
The batteries are where the money hides
This is the one that trips people up. On a lot of cordless listings the batteries are worth more than the tool. A real Milwaukee or DeWalt pack runs $80 to $150 on its own. That cuts both directions:
- A "tool only" listing priced like it comes with batteries is a trap. You're paying for packs you're never going to get.
- A cheap listing that happens to include two good batteries can be a steal even if the drill itself is nothing special. I've bought the tool just for the batteries more than once.
- Dead or puffy batteries are a real cost, not a maybe. If the seller won't say whether they hold a charge, budget for replacements and knock it off your offer.
Reading a battery from a photo
You can't really confirm a battery is good from a picture, but you can spot a bad one. Watch for a swollen or cracked case, green or white crust on the terminals, and whether the little fuel-gauge lights are actually shown lit up. "Works great" with no photo of anything powered on is a claim, not proof. Assume the packs are dead and negotiate from there. If they turn out fine, great, that's a bonus.
Red flags that quietly eat the margin
- Missing pieces. A table saw with no fence, a grinder with no guard, a drill with no chuck key. These sell for a fraction and some of them are just unsafe.
- Water and rust past the light surface kind. Internal corrosion means the bearings and switches are already dying, you just can't see it yet.
- Frayed cords or a taped-up repair on a corded tool. That's a safety problem and buyers run from it.
- "For parts / not working." Sometimes a great repair flip. Only if you genuinely know the fix and what the part costs, though. Otherwise it's inventory that never leaves.
- Fakes. Counterfeit Milwaukee batteries and tools are everywhere now. Weird fonts on the label, the wrong charger in the photo, and a price that's too good are the usual tells.
Do the math before you turn the key
Profit isn't resale minus asking price. Take out the real costs: the gas and time to go get it, any batteries or parts you'll have to replace, a cleanup, and selling fees if you're shipping. Then ask the only question that actually matters, which is whether the profit is worth the hours. A $120 flip you grab on the drive home beats a $180 one that swallows a whole Saturday, every time.
Base your resale number on sold listings, not the hopeful asking prices sitting there unsold (I get into that in how to price used items to resell). Then work back to the highest price you'd ever pay, and hold that line at the curb no matter how nice it looks in person.
Let the boring part run itself
Running this whole checklist on every listing by hand is the part that burns resellers out. That's exactly the job Worth Radar took off my plate: it watches your local marketplaces, reads each new tool listing's photos and condition, checks the resale value against real sold comps, and hands you a profit-per-hour and a max-buy price, so you only spend your evening on the ones actually worth chasing.