Regency Stamp Auctions In St. Louis

Anybody got current information about the firms status and if they plan to close their stamp auction operations and David's illness ?

I read on another forum that Regency would not have an auction in St. Louis and that their material was being released to other auction houses.

Looks like other stamp chat boards are starting to discuss the situation at Regency but I don't see any new updated information just internet found historical facts being posted.
There can be a few factors that is causing the firm to reduce or close it's operations . So I am going to speculate here what cause it or what contribute to the changes going on .
First is the health of the owner , but he had a strong staff and fine people running the philatelic division of the business ,so I have to say the problems of the firm are in other sections like all the aviation/space memorabilia ,sports memorabilia and Hollywood memorabilia,were stuff was purchased and over paid for and should only be accepted as consignments.
Another area that could help their downfall was some of their major consignors demanded better deals or gave notice their taking all the high quality U.S. material to a East coast firm because pricing at auction in the Midwest had poor realizations . So expect a major announcement of a big player joining up with someone on the East Coast .
Another downfall any auction house deals with is they want to buy out right and not deal with consignments and the danger there is that they are overpaying for material and then trying to get their money back .
Not sure which happen here but likely a combination of all of the above and a good reason for the owner to pull the plug .

Must be a challenge operating outside the higher levels these days. The presence of online auction formats - whereas in the past the private seller only had small ads in specialist magazines - means that the commission element has to be kept as low as possible. The pressure is therefore on the buyer's premium, which can already be anything from 15-25%, and doesn't leave the house with much room to play with in that direction,

Regency Superior is closing because the owner, David Kols, is very sick. Cancer.

There has been widely discussed elsewhere on the internet about a month or so ago.

As was relayed in e-mail from Dave Kols: "We are not out of business. I was hit with cancer and now doing chemotherapy treatments.

"Accordingly, we have streamlined the Company down to 5 staffers. Sad to say our last auction will be April 1st at the St Louis Expo."

"pricing at auction in the Midwest had poor realizations........" I don't know about that as a blanket statement. I've bought some stuff in the past 9 months from Rasdale Stamps' auctions, based in the Chicago area. Their prices realized seem to be comparable with houses on the two coasts, from what I've seen.

The other SCF has just reported that Regency will not have a presence at the St Louis show.

The Regency web site, which has not been updated in months, is now not functional at all. Does anyone know if their stock has been sold as announced and if so who purchased it? Also, does anyone know Mr. Kols' condition; best wishes to him of course.

Article in Linns today:

http://www.linns.com/news/auctions/...ign=USStamps

Sad news, I wish him the best with his fight with cancer. I also send best wishes and prayers to his family. (I am here to tell you that chemo is a drag. It sucks even more to deal with chemo AND dialysis. But any day that you are vertical and dressed is a good day!)

I do have to say that the analysis of 'legacy' philatelic metrics like traditional auction houses, number of Linn's subscribers, and/or the number of APS members is no longer a good measure of the health of our hobby. Those who take that position are discounting online activity. I know of no way to calculate how much online activity there is for the entire hobby. There has been growth for this forum. Stamp Smarter has grown very well the last few years; traffic has doubled every year for the last 3 years straight. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of online auction listings across a multitude of sites.

Until someone comes up with a good way to analyze and understand how much online activity there is it seems impossible to estimate whether or not the hobby is growing or shrinking.
Don

Don,




Not to hijack the original thread (move me elsewhere if desired), what metrics might be available on "this" Forum as presently supported by the software, and what might be a meaningful metrics if one could implement the ability to capture them?

(1) The number of members and guests active on a daily basis? Some forums display this metric.

(2) The number of new threads started daily? The number of old threads with new posts? The number of individual posts? The number of members making posts?

Would a measure of such statistics today -- or for a week, a month, a year -- compared to a previous period be relevant? My instinct would think such metrics would show increasing activity, but, who knows?

I have no idea how to implement such, just thinking out loud.

I hate to see auction houses shutdown, I was really sad to see Michael Rogers auction come to an end. It was the only auction I could drive to in Florida. Nice folks too!

On the other hand it seems to me SAN (Stamp Auction Network) is adding new auctions all the time. I wonder how many items a year get auctioned thru there?

Hi mml1942!
Every website server automatically gathers traffic statistics and each website admin has access to them 24/7. They supply a large amount of good traffic data; actually pages and pages of all kinds of good info. (Including how long a visitors stays, which pages are getting the most and least amounts of traffic, where visitors came from, where visitors go to, what search words they are using, the busiest time of day, the busiest day of the week, what browsers are being used, etc.)

The first challenge is to compile all the various online resource traffic; there are literally thousands of philatelic websites and resources. The second challenge would then to be to detect and track any trending info. We can manually calculate how many philatelic listings there are in ebay today; that's great but it does not tell us if the number of listings is growing or shrinking. We need this info for the same time period over the last number of years.

Some of this is getting folks to think in a different way about the health of our hobby. For example, I am a bit mystified as to why APS constantly tracks and keeps members informed of membership numbers but never, ever published any website traffic info. Money is spent on the website. Seems like a simple, easy, and no-cost, thing to do publish and promote the traffic metrics for the APS website. I assume they are reaching a lot of users online, why not publish this info? Would not growing website traffic numbers help a bit with offsetting appearance of declining traditional membership numbers?

We have a long way to go to transition to embracing online hobbyists and understanding just how big/small this community really is.
Don

SAN has some metrics published on their site. I copied these from there:

Visits 4,500/day
Members 25,000 (70% US - 30% Worldwide)
Companies Represented 228 Auction Firms
Lots Sold 1.9 Million / year

Good info, thanks!

I can't fault APS for its posture. It's a nonprofit run by a Board of Directors with limited resources, not by an online "community". Each published data item would lead to a new onslaught of comment, hand-wringing and advice. But there is a limit to the amount of input that a Board can process. There comes a point where publishing everything and accepting comment on everything simply becomes a distraction to operations. Having said this, I'm quite sure that Scott and his team internally are looking closely at such data and using it to guide what they do, which includes a website revamp. I know for a fact that they are specifically looking at ways of outreach to the online community for growth in 2017. It's just not productive to open everything up to the comment-o-sphere.

Chris