Selling Foreign Stamps

Hi

I am working on my brothers collection. He would like to sell one of the books I am working on. there are no stamps past 1900. of course all the stamps are hinged.

Is there some place he could sell the whole book. I would place the value by the stamps I have checked already at $30,000 Scott's catalog 2006 price.
All of the US stamps seem to have been removed.

Thank You
Brian

You need someone with experience to look at it first . Can you put up a few scans to this page .The album could contain damaged copies and forgeries .Just where did he buy the stamps or any additional information would be helpful.

When choosing scans to show, don't pick the prettiest ones. Pick the ones that you think add the most value to the calculations you've done so far. That will help in getting good advice.

OK

I will try. but I seem to have trouble with size. This album was given to him by one of the customers at his restaurant. He was given 3 albums. the second album goes to 1913,the last album goes to 1934.

I just want to add that whom ever did these did a really good job. every thing seems to be in correct order.

Will try to send scans.

Thank You
Brian

Hi

Hope this works

Hope this works

"I would place the value by the stamps I have checked already at $30,000 Scott's catalog 2006 price"

The catalog value is roughly what a full service dealer would charge if you bought them one at a time and not what you would be able to sell them for, especially not if you sell the whole thing intact. Also, the catalog value assumes the stamps are in very fine condition with no faults and many old stamps have faults. Also, in general stamp catalog values have come down some due to the recession and due to fewer collectors.

France and Great Britain are two good examples where condition is king. Both sell for small percentages of catalogue value unless they are very good specimens.

You can routinely buy "okay" versions of France and GB at 5-10% of CV.

Condition seems to be an issue on some of the stamps pictured. No offense to a collector, who can collect whatever appeals to him or her, but resale value is affected. More scans, and better resolution, might help with a few more opinions...

My 2d.

Brian

As others have said above, catalogue values are very misleading, and not just because of condition. As an example, I recently bought a near-complete collection of Yugoslavia, 1945-60, unmounted mint. Catalogue value, £2,400, price £180, less than the retail cost of the album the stamps came in. In fact, when I look at a catalogue, I now automatically apply a 10% calculation to get at a rough, real world price, except for the rarer stuff from the earlier period. I don't personally have a problem with sticking sub-standard stamps in my albums, but, as Cjd says, the discount to CV becomes even greater then.

Regards.

Geoff

Hi

10% sounds like the going value. Now if I could just convince my brother.

The condition is either new or well used.

Thank You
Brian

Real world values vs. catalog values are accurately described above. I would only add that any stamps below a certain catalog value - a few dollars or so - usually bring an even lower % of catalog value, particularly from a dealer. Most dealers just plain don't want/don't need the cheapest and most common stamps for their inventory and you will be lucky to get pennies for them. Dealers probably won't even consider the value of those stamps when making you an offer. They're mostly interested in mid-range and higher-value stamps, those retailing for several tens to hundreds of dollars and up.

To get a better idea of what you might actually get for them, you might want to tally up just the stamps valued at around $10 and up, since cheaper stamps are worth very little to a dealer, who likely already has more of those stamps than he knows what to do with. You'd get more for the cheaper ones by selling directly to another collector (via ebay, etc), but even most "serious" collectors don't pay that much attention to lower value stamps because they likely already have them in their collections. If you have $30k in catalog value but they're all from stamps with a cat value of under $5, 10% is probably too high. If a lot of that value is in stamps valued at $25, $50 or $100 and up, 10% becomes more realistic and might even be a bit low depending on what you have. There are a zillion factors in play and, as others have already mentioned, condition is probably the most important, particularly on the older ones.