$475,000 Ebay Listing

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NobleSpirit...em43d879a74e

Anybody have some spare change they want to invest? Came across this on ebay. Would anybody really bid on that sight unseen?

The consignor requires seller 'Noble Spirit' to sell the entire collection as one lot. Seems pretty strange, and unlikely to sell in this format. Thanks for posting this.

This lot has been around for a long time now. Even at approximately 10% of cat (assuming the $4 million is accurate) it still hasn't sold. One of the big problems is the huge percentage of stamps which will catalog $1 or less. The other problem is time and space; almost no one would have enough of either to even begin to sell enough to make enough profit to make it worth buying.

And if a collector buys this, do they spend the rest of their lives looking at it and trying to figure out their new wish list? :)

Interesting Q & A at the end, if you can scroll that far:

Q: I thought I saw this lot sell for $625,000??? Did they pick out what they wanted and have you re-list it for a lower price or was there something wrong with this stamp lot? Thanks...
A: The buyer could not complete the transaction. The consignor has reduced the price. The two events are unrelated. Are you interested/

Hi,
Well, this is one ebay offering that should have been given to one of those reputable auction houses. Even then, it is way too big to get properly reviewed by potential buyers. IMO, it just won't sell for a decent price as a group. It needs to be split up into categories (i.e. by country, alpha country, regular issues, BOB, etc.) to get the attention it deserves.

That being said, I sure would like to go through it..............

There are a lot of problems with that ebay lot . First and foremost is the describer doesn't know anything about display and marketing stamps . Second there is no explanation of what is included . At that price range the first thing you tell about is GOOD certs and what has been expertized ,this lot should have a box full of certificates . Second is complete key sets ,like the U.S. Columbians ,the Zepps . What about British Pound values ,What about the Black and red Berlin overprints ,the WIPA sheets and the Mao issues of China .
The words missing is ALL DIFFERENT ,with out that it cuts the price to a fraction of asking price . . The write up stinks .

If there was any real money to be made on this lot a big auction house (Kelleher comes to mind) would have stepped in and bought it already. They have the resources to handle it and then get the commission on both ends. Obviously they have not done so.

It probably would be fun to go thru once. Maybe. But how many collectors would like to work with the size of that collection on a regular basis? I think we all have those little areas that we enjoy, that we develop a deep knowledge of, and that get us going every day when it comes to stamp collecting. And the size of this collection is just overwhelming in that respect.

It definitely appears to be a "quantity over quality" lot. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of lots, and I certainly have purchased my share of them, having lots of fun along the way... but it's usually at pennies on the dollar with respect to catalog value, ESPECIALLY when the lots are comprised primarily of low-value items.

The asking price is not reasonable, especially given the writeup. In fact, I'll be surprised if it sells for one quarter of the asking price.

The seller likely is under constraints imposed by the consignor, which sometimes happens. Possibly the consignor is a family, estate attorney, or other party seeking to avoid the hassle of a drawn-out process involving breaking up the collection, selling in numerous lots, and waiting to get paid by numerous sellers. But that is probably inevitable. And the seller has not done them any favors by failing to describe the collection adequately.

"Noble Spirit" has several other ebay lots asking over $100K. Search "stamp collection" in ebay, then sort by Highest Price first. Entertaining.

I've noticed that with this seller on more than one occasion. They take lots (and lots) of pictures, but with precious little written description and the pictures themselves are often arranged in a fashion that doesn't make a lot of sense from a selling perspective. Rather than picturing an album in order from the first page to the last, they should show the better items first. I've seen some of their lots sell for a lot less than they should have because they showed hundreds of pictures of cheap common stamps first, and the expensive stamps way at the bottom. Not everyone is going to scroll and scroll their way through hundreds of pictures of stamps they care nothing about - they'll give up before they get to the good stuff.

If this collection truly cataloged $4M, then $475K is less than 12% of catalog. A dealer could part it out by country at 30% of catalog and have 60% gross margin. Something doesn't quite seem to add up...

I don't think that many people are going to pay 30% of catalog for an entire country collection. Individual stamps and sets, yes, but probably not for an entire collection of thousands of stamps. It also depends on how much of that $4M is in cheaper (say, sub-$5) stamps. Catalog values on those are pretty much meaningless and these stamps are worth pennies to most collectors, and basically nothing at all to a dealer. It also depends greatly on the condition of the more expensive items as well.

I've never been a full time dealer, so this is my layman's thinking, but if I were buying with an eye toward selling, I'd hope to *get* 10-12% of CV and would hope to buy it at half that or less. This is not to say there wouldn't be better items that would bring a much higher price sold individually, but those would have to compensate for the thousands of other stamps that would sell for pennies. For a sizable country collection as a whole, I'd be surprised to get much more than the aforementiond 10-12%, unless of course it's got a lot of exceptional items or exceptional quality, etc.

Artful, my thoughts exactly. I actually wrote a comment along those lines but decided not to post it. You hit the nail far more directly on the head than I could.

But after all the criticism of Noble Spirit's methods of photographing and describing, take a look at

http://www.ebay.com/itm/29107625627...RK:MEBIDX:IT

The photos for this one are thoroughly annotated via post-it notes, with each page cv totaled and certificates photographed legibly next to the page with the certed stamp.

I suppose it's possible that the consignor did all this work rather than Noble Spirit's staff. But it is pretty thorough. No, it doesn't pull the most important stuff out and show it first, it goes in sequence from beginning to end. But it's a US collection only and so anyone seriously interested in it will know exactly where to look for the key items. Of course one can't examine the backs of the stamps, so condition issues persist.

And, with all the annotating work, it might have been not a whole lot more work to break it down into individual lots. I guess the pool of possible buyers is limited to a dealer who succeeds in talking the price way down from $550,000 and is willing to break it down into saleable lots. As a whole collection it will never sell anywhere close to the asking price.

Wow - I can't imagine the time involved with putting something like this together. I'll bet there are some good stories ... interesting to see some high value things hinged into their spaces. Raymodj, you are right - what does one do if they bought this? The hunt would be mostly over. Move on to coins?