Interesting Auction Of Big Blue Collection On Ebay

This is a pretty decent Big Blue collection being offered by Noblespirit;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Noblespirit....m1438.l2649

What makes this interesting to me is that it was auctioned last week with a reserve and bidding quickly went to $4650. I thought there would be late bidding that would push the bidding above $5000 which I guessed was the reserve, but there was no late bidding. It will be interesting to see how the bidding goes without the reserve.

Here's the original auction;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Noblespirit....m1438.l2649

Let's review what they are selling . First it is a nice worldwide collection ,a life time collection . A few things become evident right away , first the collector didn't put serious money into any stamps and didn't try to complete his pages . There are tons of broken sets ,so a dealer would have little interest in the collection .
Who ever put this together was sloppy with mounting duplicates because you can't tell if its different watermarks ,different shades or different perforations .
The collection is hard to tell what the totals stamps are my guess is 60,000 or less which means the ebay seller is looking at 8 cents per stamp which is high for that collection . When no totals are given then fiqure on the low side . A collection like this would be priced between $3,000 to $3,500 at Kelleher or Rasdale if it went up for auction .
The way it was put together with lots of holes on almost every page tells me it was build with mixture lots . I didn't see any $10.00 and over stamps ,so trying to get over .06 per stamp will be hard but you never know if a buyer thinks it could have hidden treasures then the price could climb if two people are thinking they are looking at a gold mine ,but for me I would pass .

Floortrader. I agree completely. I did not spot any really rare or super-valuable stamp.

60,000 stamps - $3000...a lot of activity to remount it all.

" a lot of activity to remount it all" why would you do that ? I purchased a few collections like that.
I place that collection next to mine and go page by page over a few months and just remove what I need and upgrade the ones in better condition into my albums ,sure it would take a few months ,all the while looking for shade difference and neat cancels . After I finish then use that set as a place to mount duplicates .
At the end with new stuff added I would sell it recover most of my original expense .I did this 3 or 4 times in the 1980's and 1990's .

It's hard to keep up to these guys;





I think this is pretty aggressive when the highest bid was $4650.

Floortrader I agree with your analysis and auction estimate of $3000.

Hidden reserves repress bidding because people figure why waste time bidding when the reserve may be unreasonable, which it clearly was in this case.

I agree reserves cut down on bidding, that's why I thought it would be interesting to see the difference between a reserve auction and no reserve on the same item but now we'll never know.

tons of lower value stamps and as was noted before not in complete sets. It would be very time consuming to make a profit if your goal is to resell,

Noblespirit's Buy-It-Now listings are laughably idiotic. They routinely put the Buy It Now price at full Scott even when the material has major faults.

Their auctions are a different matter, as they usually start them at a buck and let them go to wherever they wind up, but the fixed price listings are a different animal entirely.

I wonder if the fixed price listings are those where the consignor has set a minimum, and rather than incur the higher listing fees associated with reserves, they just opt to price it to the moon as fixed price, hoping that the clueless will make offers.

Weird.

Occasionally it works;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NobleSpirit...AOSwrfVZRA7j

Wow lots and lots and lots of mostly low value in the photos. One that caught my eye Japan 422 has a note "crease" and it's pretty worn out too. I hope the buyer got to do an in-person review.

KRELYEA---Nice collection ,100+ volumes ,looks like a nice intermediate collection , very neat and clean .Looks like it didn't sell . Sure could fill a lot of spaces in my 1970's and up Internationals . But the price at $78,000 is way out of line
DDAANN ---Japan 422 has been counterfeited ,would need a cert.

It says "Sold" on the listing, at the asking price.

I think it sold for a best offer:

My bad, I forgot that the actual listing page doesn't show whether something sold for best offer or not, only the index pages.