In April when I was in Milwaukee for the NCAA Frozen Four hockey tournament, I bought a book titled “A History Of Sigma Alpha Epsilon In The World War” at an antique mall. The book is relatively rare and it sold via an eBay auction for $703.00.
Yesterday, I purchased another copy of the same book at a thrift shop in Grand Forks. This one will go on eBay also. I just finished writing the auction listing for it, and while doing so the book brought several thoughts to mind.
First, what are the odds of finding two copies of a rare item similar to this book within a three month period of time? Whatever they are, it’s happened to me before and I’m sure it has to others also.
The first time it happened, I found two identical licorice tins that each sold for a little more than $2500. I both of them within a week and less than 100 miles apart. I’ve never seen another one offered for sale since.
Several years later I found two Fisher Price Donald & Donna Duck pull-toys within one hour at a small flea market in central Minnesota. This is arguably, the rarest of all Fisher Price toys and I’ve only seen two others since that time.
Four years ago at Gold Rush Days in Rochester, Minnesota I paid $4 for an aspirin tin that I’d never seen before for my collection. I walked out of the dealer’s booth and into the booth right next to it, and bought an identical tin for $35. One sold on eBay and the other is still in my own collection. Those are the only two examples of that aspirin tin I’m aware of.
Second, most people would say these are examples of being very lucky, but I disagree. In each case, I found both the first and second examples of each item because I had put myself in places where there was an opportunity to find good salable items.
If you sit home all the time, it’s very unlikely you are going to find anything that will sell on eBay. If you spend 5 hours a week visiting thrift shops, garage sales, antique shops or malls, flea markets, antique shows, auction sales, estate sales, etc., you improve your chances of finding things to sell. The more hours a week you put yourself in front of potential inventory, the more inventory you find.
Luck has nothing to do with it. Luck would be if the second copy of the book had fallen out of an airplane and hit me on the head.
Put yourself in places where good inventory can find you and you will find it.
Finally, when you find a second or third example of something you’ve previously sold for quite a bit of money, give some thought to how your previous successful sale may affect the current one.
When the first example of the fraternity book sold it received quite a few bids and sold for $703.00. However, once the bidding reached $300, there were only two people who kept bidding. Then right at the end someone who hadn’t yet bid came in and sniped the other two and won the book.
Since the winner of the first auction now owns a copy of the book, I’m assuming he is now out of the market. That means there’s a possibility there are only two people who are willing to pay much more than $300 for this book. There’s also a possibility that one of those two may have acquired a copy elsewhere. Also, since it’s prime vacation time, it’s possible one of them (hopefully not both) might be on vacation and never see the second copy on eBay.
Because of this, I decided to include a Buy-It-Now price in this auction - something I never do. My thinking is that since both bidders were still bidding in the mid $600 range on the first auction, if I used a BIN of $650, even if only one of them sees the listing, they might decide to grab it at that price to insure they get it.
Of course, there’s always the chance two or three other bidders might get involved, and without the BIN the book might bring even more. Since I only paid a quarter for the book, that’s a chance I’ll take.
I’d be perfectly happy to take a $600 profit and have the money for the next time I get “lucky.” I’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.
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July 11th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Gary,
You are right. I think a lot of this has to do with opening our eyes. I made a market in a rare item for years. Insignifigant variation most collectors including me didn’t care about.
When I found the first one, I was going to give it away as a cheap oddity. The local “experts” said it was never made and treated me rudely for even suggesting it. I figured I’d put an ad in a national newsletter and see what happened. The first day the newsletter came out I sold the item for my asking price - $650. I think I got six calls about it.
For the next few years, I bought these ignored oddities for prices between 4 and 7 dollars at shows all over the southwest, then shipped them to the people who’d called about the first one for prices between $150 and 700.
I’ve had this happen to me so many times I cannot count them all. One of my favorite examples is buying a really rare 1930 Lionel train made especially for Macy’s on eBay in order to upgrade my set. Three weeks later I bought an even better set at a train show for less than I’d paid on eBay. By the time I was done, I’d upgraded my set and made a few hundred dollars.
One thing that I learned the hard way was selling components. I’d buy an engine without a tender, and then three weeks later find someone else with the right tender and no engine. Sadly I’d already sold the engine. Once it happened on the same day and I was able to put them together. Now I keep tenders, but sell engines.
Terry
July 12th, 2006 at 12:51 am
Terry,
Your right - opening our eyes and putting ourselves in places things are likely to show up.
After writing this post, I realized that at times there is some luck involved though.
When I bought the first Donald & Donna toy I mentioned the vendor I bought it from asked me if I wanted a bag for it. Since I was set up just a little further down that isle I said no thanks and head back to put it in the van.
On the way another vendor asked me “did you buy that from my wife while I was gone?” I said no and he said - I asked because we have one just like it. I asked if I could see it and ended up buying the second one from him.
If I’d said yes to the offer of the bag, he would never have seen me carrying it, and someone else might have gotten his before I saw it. So, I guess it was just dumb luck that I said no to the offer of the bag.
Gary
July 19th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I just got an email from one of my readers that relates to this topic. I was explaining the value of specializing in specific types of collectibles.
Here it is:
One other perspective that might be useful is based on an old experimental psychology finding. The gist of the experiment was this. A subject was shown a picture or even a real array of many different sorts of objects, and they were told to memorize as many as they could before the objects
were once again covered.
A second version of the test was performed in exactly the same way except that this time the subject was told to look
for certain specific kinds of objects. The surprising finding was that the latter subjects consistently recalled more of ALL the objects than those who were given no focusing instructions.
On that basis as well, then, your suggestion to focus on a narrower range of collectibles will in time actually help the reader become widely aware of other types of collectibles as well.
Narrowing facilitates widening!
What a peculiar concept.
Regards - Jim A
Makes sense to me.