So the back story on this collection... is that it showed up at the shop in Feb 2023, and a local stamp dealer came and appraised it for us to make an offer to the owner. It was appraised at $5K (I wasn't party to the negotiation, just knew what the appraisal value was). It fit in five large boxes, two of which had lots of "loose" stamps (tiny little albums, glassine envelopes and ziplock bags of loose stamps... I weeded out all stamps on paper when I got this collection and gave them back to the shop, won't touch that with a 10 foot pole).
So around February when it was obtained by the shop, they sent it out to an auction house. The auction house did nothing with it for six months (and I could see why when I got my hands on it, it's a full time job for three months for one person to deal with all those stamps, I've been working on it part time for two months, and am only halfway through the collection). Basically we said "give us our stamps back" when it became evident they were going to sit on them, and my brainiac comment to our shop owner was "if you let them keep it, it's just going to lose value while it's not being sold". That seemed to create a sense of urgency to get the collection back for us to deal with ourselves.
Well when I got it, I went through everything, and I gave my appraisal value of it at $3500 (what we would pay the customer, I'm a little unsure how much we can sell it for since there were too many unknown items in this collection that needed careful research, I'm going through it in detail now).
Well there was stuff at the bottom of a shoebox that had a very high value and was at one point, six months ago, particularly scarce. But now there's 4 or 5 of these Dollar value jubilee stamps on eBay in every denomination they made. I have a full set, but to avoid the issue of signature on delivery I broke the set apart and have been listing them slowly to reduce the chances of a $750 sale which will be problematic for me to ship from Canada. (I will deal with it if it comes up, but I'm trying to avoid that by limiting the availability online, and they are selling, just not fast).
This is my fear though with this collection... it's dropped 30% in value from the time the shop got it until the time I got it, which was about 6 or 7 months later. And while I'm processing it, more of these rare stamps are appearing on eBay and the prices are being pushed down. I have stuff going up but in a few weeks or so, more are appearing that undercut my prices and I have to lower them.
I guess you could say I'm concerned on how much profit will be left by the time I'm unable to sell any of these stamps at all... I have set aside all coins, banknotes, tokens and anything that's low value or purchased by common collectors in favour of trying to get the rare valuable stamps dealt with first.
Basically the pool of collectors is decreasing as we move forward in time, and our shop is seeing all sorts of rare things turning up right, left, and centre as baby boomers downsize and estate sales come in. This stamp collection is no exception. It's the greatest thing I've ever seen, and since I got it, a few more collections have turned up (that I had to pass on selling for them), and I'm not even excited to see a bunch of Canadian Bluenose stamps because after the great big collection, nothing seems to be very rare anymore as it comes into the shop.
Well if you deal in stamps and collectibles and have feedback on the declining pool of customers and prices dropping, and rare stuff turning up everywhere... I definitely want to hear from you.
If you don't deal in collectibles, I hope you enjoyed my story of the day.
C.
