Stanley Gibbons Qv Material High Pricing

Whats up with their pricing of qv material? Many of these listed items on their site seem way of the top price wise. Take a look

https://www.stanleygibbons.com/search/?q=covers

A$198,100.89 for a penny black cover? Worth it?

A$104,263.62 for a Mulready cover

They are really setting super high prices for these and many others. Will any buy at those prices?

No one has ever accused Gibbons of being a discount vendor.

Prices are high, but there is some amazing stuff at the top end. In some cases, a 3x markup on what things sold for at auction about 8-10 years ago. That works out to be about a 15% compound annual growth rate over that period.

Try this link:
https://www.stanleygibbons.com/en_G...rt=price_h2l

The best early GB covers can and have sold in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. You should scan through the William Gross Collection sale listings to see some of these gems and note the results (c.f. lots 12, 32, 45).
http://stampauctionnetwork.com/f/f93.cfm

Does SG take high end material in on consignment?

Good question 51studebaker on the consignment front as I have sold gb stuff just as good as theirs and never been able to get anywhere near their prices. Maybe consign with them would fetch thousands? I still wonder who would pay over $600,000 for a penny black cover with 2 blocks of 4 on it. Granted its rare but that's serious biscuits. Thanks for the links chipg I will check them out. I wish some of mine would sell this high.

The cover you are referencing is $450,000 currently. Who are the buyers? Multi-millionaires or more likely billionaires from Russia, China or the Middle Eastern oil empires. It should be borne in mind that there are people in the world for whom writing a $450K check is like you and me spending $45; they use these buys to park their money in alternative hard assets rather than having everything in real estate, commodities or stocks. In any event the stated price likely is a starting point for negotiation with the agent of someone at that level, and the final price will be lower. Further, the particular piece you referenced is apparently unique, with a celebrity provenance:

Stoneham's market prices (as opposed to SG catalogue prices) for 1d blacks on cover (aside from Plate 11) range from £210 to £400. This SG and other auction material on the links is in a different world from anything one would see day-to-day. I don't think I'll be selling myhouse to fund a cover purchase!

£210 to £400 more realistic on ebay to.

£210 to £400 is fine for a run-of-the-mill penny black cover. However, there is nothing run-of-the-mill about some of the covers on the Gibbons site or the Gross collection.

For most of the items in the Gross collection, for example, they are absolutely the best of that type of item Catalog values are irrelevant. Another way to look at it - if a "standard" cover with a "standard" penny black single has a £300 catalog value, then there is a distribution curve of values - from say £50 at one end, to £1500 at the other. It's a skewed distribution, with most of the covers between the 50 and 300 marks. The tail may be very long, but it is very thin. As a result, there is a lot of competition at that right edge among the top collectors for the things that are gems.

Look at a couple of pages of results from this auction last week. You'll see that the prices for "normal" stuff is pretty "normal," but the prices for the first two lots is a tad more (about $100,000 each, once you add the buyers premiums and convert from pounds)
http://www.davidfeldman.com/auction...all/all/all/